On Friday, July 15, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s deputy director of organizing and training, Thalia Zapatos, highlighted California’s statewide efforts to fight the upcoming ballot initiative that seeks to ban marriage and domestic partnerships for same-sex couples in the California Constitution. The initiative would also block the state from offering any benefits to gay and lesbian couples and prevent co-adoption. Zapatos and Center board member M.E. Stephens provided an update on the national, state and local struggles for marriage equality.

Zapatos spent 25 years in Oregon working on various progressive political issues. Since then, she has helped fight every anti-GLBT ballot measure that has hit the state ballot since 1988, including the most recent No On Constitutional Amendment 36 campaign, which lost by a vote of 57 to 43 percent last November. It banned same-sex marriage in Oregon.

“We actually have the distinguishing feature [in Oregon] of being the state that has fought more statewide and local measures, a total of 37 measures that we have fought up there. I have the gray hair and scars to prove it,” she said.

Zapatos discussed the discouraging results from some of the 13 states where same-sex marriage was voted against in last year’s 2004 election cycle. In Mississippi a measure lost by a whopping 86 to 14 percent.

Many states did not even wage a campaign to fight the proposed marriage amendments, while fund-raising in the states that did have a campaign were at very low levels, Zapatos said.

“By July 1 [2004] the combined total of fund-raising in the 13 states was just under $350,000, but that included a single gift in Utah of $250,000,” she said. “We’re talking about literally a 100-day period of time where even the most vocal, vociferous campaigns – in Oregon and Utah and a couple of other states – tried to engage the voters on the issue of same-sex marriage.”

Zapatos said opponents to the No On 36 campaign in Oregon claimed the ballot initiative was not aimed at homosexuals, and they would welcome civil unions. Conversely, the opposition spent most of last fall fighting a civil unions bill that is currently progressing through the Oregon Legislature. She said they flat-out lied throughout the entire campaign.

Zapatos displayed a series of television advertisements from Utah, Oregon and Missouri focusing on both sides of the various marriage amendments campaigns. Many were from campaigns in Oregon last fall.

“One of the main challenges we’ve had is just actually getting people to open up and listen to the potential fact that there is some new information about marriage that they don’t yet know,” said Zapatos.

In one of the ads, a woman in Oregon talked about her relationship with her partner and the fact that she was barred from going into intensive care after her partner went in for coronary bypass surgery.

“Situations like this are so unknown to the general public that literally person after person told us, when we knocked on their door to discuss the issue with them, that she must have been an actress that was hired and it was a made-up story, because no one who cared about someone else would ever contest that at the intensive care unit,” said Zapatos. “No one had ever asked them if they were legally married. There are so many levels of assumptions of the voters that we really, really have to break through.”

Another ad showed a Utah mother recalling how she thought gay people were terrible people until her son told her he was gay. She urged the public to vote against a proposed Utah amendment that sought to ban same-sex marriage.

Zapatos said one of the main lessons she and her colleagues have learned from the Oregon campaign is that campaigning and organizing early is paramount to success. If marriage equality opponents are successful getting their initiative on the ballot, California will most likely vote on it next June.

The California statewide campaign committee is already hard at work organizing bands of people together, Zapatos said. The Center’s chief executive officer, Delores Jacobs, Center board member Kevin Tilden and co-chair of San Diegans Against Marriage Discrimination, Dale Kelley Bankhead, are members representing San Diego on the committee.

“The single, the individual, the one-on-one conversations that we have with people about marriage from now – every opportunity, at the supermarket, at the haircutters, at the family holiday celebration – every time we can bring up this topic and give people more information is a voter education contact,” said Zapatos, who added that many “yes voters” turned into “no voters” in Oregon, and her coalition did not have enough time to change their minds before election day.

“When we have time to engage with someone on the issue, we can get them. I’m talking about older voters, younger voters, voters of every age and ethnicity. They’re with us,” said Zapatos. “Our mission is really to help assist at the grass-roots level our statewide, citywide and countywide partners to fight the battle that they need to fight.”

Stephens, a local attorney, urged the community to participate in the battle to defeat the ballot initiative. “My question to you is, ‘What are you going to do today and tomorrow and for the next 300 days before the election to make sure that people understand [that] you and your love is equal to everyone else’s and that Californians’ reject discrimination?’” asked Stephens. “Who are you going to tell your story to? Are you going to vote? Are you going to bring your neighbors and your friends and your family? What resources are you going to bear on this educational debate for the next 300 days? Believe me, folks, there are not enough hours in a day to reclaim the love that we are entitled to.”

Zapatos said that although there are no television ads in development right now for the California campaign, the strategy in the coalition’s messaging will be to reach out to the undecided voters or “soft” yes voters.

“People who are sort of going along with the ‘yes’ vote [to ban same-sex marriage and domestic partnerships in California] but [for whom] no one has presented a case to them as to why not,” said Zapatos. “They tend to be people who don’t want to discriminate.”