I gave myself a week to cool down after Katherine Kersten's "That's a funny way to show tolerance," a column that portrayed the battle over gay marriage in that California as one fraught with intimidation at the hands of "gay activists." I think invoking "Ku Klux Klan" and "neo-Nazis" as comparisons to the anger felt by members of the LGBT community when their right to marry was voted away by their neighbors constitutes intellectual vandalism; it offers nothing constructive to the debate on marriage equality in Minnesota or California except to passive-aggressively name-call.
But, the context that Kersten left out of her writing is crucial to understanding the "bullying tactics" she says target people of faith. Fortunately, in the age of the internet, context is only a click away.
It was Christian groups who bankrolled a vast amount of the misleading advertising in support Prop 8. The groups pushed out ads reminiscent of Anita Bryant's "Save the Children" campaign of the late-1970s, that giving gays rights would harm children. Prop 8 supporters used a similar campaign, "Protect Our Children."
"The focus on children was the most striking thing - that we have to protect them from gay marriage. That it could lead children who are confused about their sexuality to become gay, which would be undesirable," testified Yale historian George Chauncey during the Prop 8 trial. "It was a very effective campaign. Its very name drew on and renewed these public campaigns labeling homosexuals as child abusers," said Chauncey.
"It is a sign of how the place of gay people has changed and what one can say in polite society about gays since Anita Bryant has changed," said Chauncey. "[The ad] is a pretty strong echo of the argument that simple exposure to gay people is going to lead a whole generation of gay kids."
The ads were even a bit too strong for the Mormons, a religion that bankrolled a significant portion of the anti-marriage equality forces, and they tried to hide their significant involvement.
It's in that environment that frustrations led to violence by both sides of the marriage debate in California. There were documented reports of intimidation, vandalism and violence on both sides of the Prop 8 campaign, but very little manner in which to aggregate them all. Fortunately, California has a robust bias crime reporting system, and certainly if a rash of crimes committed against same-sex marriage opponents, it would show up there.
In 2008, the year of the contentious Prop 8 battle and the most recent year for which data is available, there were 8 bias crimes against Protestant Christians and 12 against Catholics in California. That's roughly what the state saw in 2007 which was 11 and 10, respectively. Presumably, the rash of anti-Prop 8 violence was directed at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), or the Mormons, which funneled huge amounts of money to fight gay marriage, but California doesn't track those numbers, only "anti-other religions." That number increased from 2007 to 2008 from 24 to 64. A very liberal estimate would say 84 bias crimes were committed against Christians of all traditions in California in 2008.
