UPDATE: I forgot to mention, while lamenting that this ad didn't come out before Prop 8 passed, you can donate now and help get it on the air in California, if your pocket book is so inclined. Now, on with the original blog post...
Alex Koppelman at Salon.com's War Room blog has a perfectly devastating post on a new ad in support of gay marriage in California. His point, in short, where was this ad before Proposition 8 passed?
It's easy enough to wake up one morning to find your rights taken away and be energized in the effort to restore them. It's understandable that people might look around them and see a predictably blue state -- though the real dynamics of California's political demographics are anything but predictably blue -- and think this is the state that would vote down a gay marriage ban. This is the state where we can feel safe in the knowledge that tolerance and humanity will win out.
But this is the real world, and in politics you don't sit idly by while people work tirelessly to take your rights away. Or you don't sit idly by while insurance companies work tirelessly to keep you from affordable healthcare. Or you don't sit idly by while credit card issuers lobby their butts off so they can keep marketing to young people and poor people. You don't sit idly by while the government funnels money to upper-middle class (and higher) Wall Street types and lets millions of poor Americans go without affordable housing or job training.
In other words, when exactly where we planning on showing up? I support every effort to restore the rights of homosexuals in California to marry, just as I suppose those efforts to make sure all Americans have the same rights. But it shouldn't have taken the denial of those rights to keep us engage and advocating on this and the host of other issues we're all too often apathetic about.
We should be doing real advocacy work, all the time. Certainly in the times before a major referendum on these issues. Reflection is good. Self-promotion is necessary, but when these things come at the expense of the very real work that will promote change and preserve liberty... it's a shame the new pro-gay marriage video didn't come out in October.
