After 20 years in the same house, I started to feel like I no longer belonged on my street. It was 2008, the year of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, but also the year of Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in California.
I covered marriage equality for the editorial board, writing several times a week about everything from the parental rights of same-sex couples to the economics of same-sex marriages.
Then I would go home, and on the last leg of my journey, I would enter a different world. Driving down my quiet Laguna Beach street felt more like running a gantlet than driving home. Most of the yards along the path were dotted with bright yellow and blue “Yes to 8” lawn signs with the image of a conventional apple-pie family that seemed to be from the 1950s instead of the 21st century: mom, dad, son. , girl, females wearing dresses. “Restore Marriage,” the signs said, as if the advent of same-sex marriage had somehow eliminated all other marriages.
The preponderance of such signs was rare in Laguna Beach, once known for its large gay population and California’s first openly gay mayor. The city’s open attitude was a large part of the reason we moved there.
On the surface, mine was just another suburban household on a California ranch: Mom, Dad, three kids, two dogs and a cat. But inside, our family values were fiercely opposed to what we saw on our street. We were suddenly strangers in a place we had always felt at home.
People who feel they have the right to impose their religious beliefs on others is not only disconcerting to members of a religious minority like me; they are scary. We are already seeing an expansion of this way of thinking about abortion, with terrible results.
When my family moved down the street, there were three same-sex households, but they were long gone by 2008. Early in the Proposition 8 campaign, a neighbor came over with pro-8 pamphlets; we informed him that while we considered him a good guy who we always got along with, we would all be better off if he never tried that again.
Just over half of California voters ended up supporting Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage in the state. The measure was immediately challenged in court, and in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the defendants in the case had no legal standing, meaning Proposition 8 was blocked and same-sex marriage could continue.
But marriage equality in California has never been defended on substance, but simply on a technicality. The text of the measure was unenforceable, but the dead words remained in the California Constitution, a dead weight on our collective conscience.
Until now.
On Tuesday, Californians defeated this reactionary measure in a more significant way by passing Proposition 3, which guarantees the right to marry without prejudice. They rejected Proposition 8’s message of hatred and intolerance, removed its language from our Constitution, and officially renounced the lack of understanding and acceptance the state’s electorate demonstrated in 2008.
Of course, times have changed in more ways than one. Young children in the Proposition 8 era are now voting for adults with broader ideas about sex and gender.
This year, no one on this street put up a lawn sign – about anything. Perhaps it was an attempt to remain friendly despite our differences in a time of great stress. Maybe it was a relaxation. Maybe they had changed their minds about same-sex marriage or were just too busy gardening.
Or maybe they realized there was no point in stoking negative feelings about a measure that polls showed was sure to pass. This time it was narrow thinking, out of step with the mainstream.
U.S. Supreme Court rulings legalizing same-sex marriage – in California and, two years later, nationally – allowed it to become mainstream. A generation grew up realizing that marriage equality helped a lot and didn’t hurt anyone. Although the initial defeat of Proposition 8 was unsatisfactory, it was nevertheless worth celebrating, both for the happiness it would bring and for the generation that had just voted in with the benefit of knowledge that many lacked voters 16 years ago.
On this day in 2008, I took out a rainbow flag I had purchased and hung it from the roof out front. His message: yes, we don’t belong here, but we’re fine with it and we’re not going anywhere.
I still live in this house today.
