Activists at the progressive Netroots Nation 2013 conference in San José, Calif. believe they won the war on gay marriage in the United States for one reason: their messaging.
“The way the messaging changed from 2004 to 2012 is that we let go of talking about talking about marriage in terms of the rights and started talking about in terms of the family, love and commitment,” Michael Crawford, the director of Online Programs at Freedom to Marry, told participants in the “Moving the Needle: How We Won Gay Marriage in 2012” panel Thursday.
“One of the ways that we did that was putting out images of same-sex couples and their families and talking about the reasons that they really wanted to marry, which turned out to be reasons that were very similar to the reasons that straight couples want to marry.”
He was joined on the panel by Ryan Davis, the vice president of community at Vocativ, Ian Grady, the communications director of EqualityMaine, Adam Robbins, the operations director for OutFront Minnesota, and Rachael Stern, a community taxonomist at NationBuilder.
Gay rights activists saw great success in 2012, winning four marriage-related ballot campaigns that legalized marriage for same-sex couples in Maine, Maryland and Washington while defeating an amendment banning same-sex marriages in Minnesota. The string of successful campaigns stood in stark contrast to those during the 2000s, when a majority of states passed some form of same-sex marriage ban.
So the question is, what changed from then until now? According to the panelists, their campaigns began using more emotional and personal content, such as showing the lives and stories of same-sex couples, and not trying to win people over through the argument of rights and fairness under the law.
“It’s time to treat all Maine families equally under the law… that was very much the message of the 2009 campaign. It was about fairness and it was about equality” Grady said, referring to Maine’s same-sex marriage initiative in 2009.
He added that a great deal of research was done after the 2009 loss, which was when they concluded that the “fairness under the law” argument was not the best one to use to win the issue because “it left people in the middle and it made people especially susceptible to arguments of civil unions.”
“If you’re whole frame is to treat people equally under the law, it makes it pretty easy for your opponents to say ‘Well we can do that with civil unions’, and that’s not what we want,” he said.
Robbins echoed Grady’s statements arguing that defeating Amendment 1 in Minnesota last November was achieved through personal conversations, phone banks and field work.
