Quest: What is your impression of the lobby day efforts?

Foreman: “It is really extraordinary. Having organized many lobby days myself I have a good idea of the energy and organization it takes to get statewide representation at an event like this. And (to do this) in January and in Wisconsin? I’m incredibly impressed!

Quest: Do you think the tide is going to turn on the gay marriage issue, considering how well the Right and the political forces that exploited the LGBT community in the last election fared? You mentioned earlier (during the lobby day press conference) that it just wasn’t so.

Foreman: Well, there was a myth put out very quickly by both some of our Democratic friends and - of course - the Christian Right - claiming the reason why George Bush was reelected was because of the marriage issue. Their premise was that it turned out and energized the Far Right base... who otherwise would not have come out (to vote). However, every in-depth analysis of the election results in key states shows that the marriage issue had NO significant impact. Take the swing states of Oregon, Michigan and Ohio - states in which there was an anti-marriage initiative on the ballot. Kerry took Oregon and Michigan by a much greater margin than (Al) Gore (in 2000). He also did much better than Gore did in Ohio. In the other eight states, they were red states and going to go for Bush anyway.
  And there’s no evidence that the marriage issue any Congressional or Senate race. The only race in which the marriage  issue was raised by the Right was (South Dakota Senator Tom) Daschle’s race and there were so many other issues in that race - choice (abortion), Daschle’s liberal record on foreign affairs... - is what tipped the scales there.
  Have we turned the corner? No, we haven't. This (same-sex marriage) is a great organizing tool for the Right. They are making a ton of money on it. Because of the limited resources on our side to combat them, we are going to continue to lose many of these ballot initiatives.

Quest: Media commentary during President Bush’s inauguration offered that more people consider themselves as being conservative or right-leaning than at any time in the last 110 years. Do you think a conservative zenith and will see a swing back to more moderate or even liberal viewpoints?
 
Foreman: The reason why we are where we are is because for the last 35 years the right wing has undertaken a methodical, simple, straight forward approach to seizing control of this country. They started with the school boards. They started with town councils, and - you know - fire marshals and they worked their way up. However, many evangelical Christians are no social conservatives. What we saw in this last election was people on the progressive side reversing the trend of Democrats in particular of not doing grassroots organizing. ACT (America Coming Together), America Votes and other progressive organizations around the country finally started doing what turns elections: door-to-door conversations with voters and turning out voters. That’s why we did so much better.
  I think that we are at the zenith of the right wing and the Republican Party having captured the market on old-fashioned politics. That used to be the purview of Democrats. I think the second Bush administration is going to push even further than in the first one and there’s going to be a reaction pushing the pendulum back.

Quest: There are progressive, non-gay grassroots organizations that have sprung up since November in Wisconsin that are co-sponsoring (the January 27) lobby day. But liberals were in the majority for so long they never learned to act like a minority, other than to whine and cry.

Foreman: I think part of (the LGBT community’s) challenge, even as progressives are organizing as never before, is they walked away from marriage equality in the last election cycle. It was not on the agenda on any of the large scale progressive organizing. We were pretty much left on our own.
  Progressives have to understand that the right wing is using gay issues to club them and that (progressives) are either going to win with us, or die with us. Whether they believe in equal rights of gay people or not is beside the point. It’s a purely political matter:we have to understand that attacks on women, on immigrants, on social and economic justice issues, and also on gay people is all part of broader social agenda. We can either be picked off one at a time, or we can unite and defeat them because we are in the majority.

Quest: Right after the election Larry Kramer, one of the most outspoken gay activists, criticized the Human Rights Campaign and the organized gay activist community in general, claiming they “did not get it.”

Foreman: I respect Larry Kramer endlessly. But there’s way too much of a tendency in our community to blame ourselves. for what is being done to us. It’s homophobia, stupid. It’s not what we’ve done. The notion that we as a very small minority in the country - you know 3-4% of the population - should have within our own resources and organizations the ability to defeat the forces that are lined up against us that spring from hundreds of years of homophobia bred into the culture is preposterous.
  If you think about what our people have done in 35 years is extraordinary, especially when you look at other social justice movements. We now have 47% of the US population covered by laws that protect gay people from discrimination. A quarter of the population is covered by laws that protect people from discrimination because of gender identity.
  In the 12 years since the Hawaii (state supreme court marriage equality) decision came down, support for marriage equality or legal recognition of our relationships have moved from the teens to 62% today. Think about that - 12 years!
  All of that has been won against enormous odds. Yeah, we could do better. Have we made mistakes? Yes. But we have done so much with so little.
  People say, “Oh, the Human Rights Campaign - They have all this money!” But Focus On The Family has more money and more employees than EVERY gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered organization COMBINED! That one organization has  more resources than every single one of our organizations put together. That’s the reality!

Quest: One argument made recently has been “why don’t all the (LGBT) groups just all get together and become a more organized and effective force as a mega-organization?”

Foreman: There’s this long-standing fallacy that we all don’t talk and we all don’t work together. In the last four weeks I have been to three meetings of the national (organizations’) executive directors. That’s nothing new. We meet and we talk. I’ve known many of the directors of the national LGBT organizations for 15-20 years.
  We would be so ill-served to have just one organization. We need an organization like the Task Force to be out front and pushing the envelope. We need an organization like HRC to be on the inside, doing the deal cutting. We need a GLAAD to be focused on the media. If we had one organization, we would not have advanced as we have.
  Look at the AIDS crisis. If we had not had Act-Up to push forward and push hard and be out there and - right behind them the people who understood the science, understood the regulatory process, AIDS would still be a mega-crisis. AIDS  remains a mega-crisis across the world but in this country it was that combination of tactics that helped us get a grip on HIV.

Quest: What about basic equality issues? We win the battle and now you’re part of a same-sex couple who comes back with your marriage license and gets fired from your job. The argument is made we need to work on basic rights first, then marriage.

Foreman: I don’t think its an “either-or” proposition. From the Task Force’s perspective, we would much rather be fighting for marriage ten years from now rather than right now. Its no secret that the legal strategy for same-sex marriage is ten years ahead of our political and our organizing strategy. We can bemoan that but the fight is here now.
  There is not another civil rights struggle where this has not been the case. People said when plaintiffs filed Brown vs. the Board of Education (in the early 1950’s) that the civil rights movement was not ready. And guess what? It was not. The African American civil rights movement was not able to sustain that on the ground.
  Frankly, we have not been able to sustain it. Schools are now (in 2005) more segregated than they were before Brown vs. the Board of Education. On a proportional basis nationwide, its worse now.
  Look at what happened with the women’s suffrage movement. They made a decision that they were going to pull back in the 1800’s to build support and basically they lost 50 years.
  We don’t have a choice. We have to fight it. What do we say? That’s it’s okay that these amendments pass even if we think they’re going to? We don’t deserve marriage equality when we do?
  The marriage issue has made me realize on an individual basis is how we internalize homophobia. We deserve marriage. For someone to say we don’t means that they see us as less than fully human.
  In New York when marriage equality advocates would come to us and say “we want to push marriage,” I’d say “Shut Up! We don’t a civil rights bill, we don’t have a hate crimes bill. Don’t put marriage on the table because the legislators will stop talking to us!”
  I think that was a mistake. We have to put our full humanity on the table. It’s like negotiating. You start asking for the most you can possibly get because you’re going end with is something less. If we start with domestic partnership, we’ll get a watered down version of that. If the bar is civil unions, then we get domestic partnership.
  We have to put everything on the table. We should not be advancing our humanity and our equal rights one little piece at a time. We’re fighting for civil rights laws all across the country. We have to. And we’re fighting for hate crimes laws, for domestic partnership benefits, and for partner registries, and for civil unions and for full marriage equality. It’s not an “either-or” proposition.
  Litigation is one of our tools. We’ve done very well by it because it has been judiciously used in certain states. The problem is that we never linked that litigation strategy with a community organizing strategy. We could have preserved the win in Hawaii but we weren’t prepared. We DID preserve in Vermont because we had done twelve years of going to county fairs and town meetings to talk about marriage.
  And we’re working on preserving marriage in Massachusetts. We have to do it selectively where the law is on our side.

Quest: You mentioned in your prepared remarks that there are three states where we have the best chance to defeat the anti-marriage amendments.

Foreman: It seems very certain that there will be an anti-marriage constitutional amendment on the ballot in California in 2006. It now looks like there will be one in Wisconsin. And there will be one on the ballot in Massachusetts in either 2006 or 2008, with another 9, 10, 11, 12 ballot questions in other states. People recognized that California, Massachusetts and Wisconsin are the three states where we have the best chance of defeating the initiatives at the polls. We need time and we need money. Real money.
  The campaign in Ohio (to defeat the amendment) spent $800,000. Kerry and ACT spent almost $70 million to elect Kerry. $800,000 to address in a complicated state with five major media markets and to talk about something as complicated as marriage. That’s nothing, that’s less than nothing in a sate like Ohio, especially when the right wing has got all their churches and the Republican Party campaigning against us.
  In Oregon, we had sufficient resources - over three million dollars. What we didn’t have - and this is critical - we didn’t have time. The Oregon campaign started in earnest 100 days before Election Day. There wasn’t enough time to adjust the message. Plus its is a mail-in ballot state, people can start mailing in their ballots three and a half weeks before Election Day. We learned in the first part of October that a significant were being moved to our side by our messaging. But they thought that they should vote “Yes” for gay marriage instead of “No” to stop the amendment banning gay marriage. That’s called wrong-way voting.
  We had to re-tool the campaign and emphasize “No on Proposition 36.” If you’re FOR gay marriage, vote AGAINST 36. Exit polls showed that 7% of our supporters voted the wrong way. That was the margin of victory. By the time we began adjusting our message, half of the ballots had already been cast.
  The Wisconsin polling numbers are not much different from many other states. In order to move those voters, you have to be able to communicate with them. There’s only two ways to effectively communicate with them: one one one or through really effective media. One on one is the most effective and the most cost efficient but its the most labor-intensive. Media messaging can work but they have to hear it seen times.
  One of the problems with the marriage issue is that it’s complicated. You have to take voters through a process: #1 - Marriage is a complicated issue, did you know that? #2 - Real families get hurt by this. #3 - Vote against it. So you’re talking about having to hit that voter 21 times, seven times for each message. In order to have someone hear it seven times, you have to play that thing at least 21 times, 63 plays total for a three part-process.
  And each time the cash register goes “ching ching.” Think of what companies pay to get you to buy, say Dial soap. Its not complicated because you’re already using soap, right? People have to understand that to we’re going to get real its going to take real life political money. And Wisconsin is a big state.

Quest: Besides money are there other barriers?

Foreman: A lot of our own people, including our allies don’t connect with marriage. They’re not interested in a partnership. They reject marriage because its patriarchal, or its institutionalized or its a heterosexual tradition, or whatever. I appreciate that. But this isn’t about marriage. This is about saying to every LGBT person that you are not fully human. Whether you want to get married or not, they’re saying to you “You’re not as good as I am.” It affects us all - whether you want to get married or not - because its an affront to our basic humanity.

Quest: And we have to recognize that we are fighting organized religion. A recent story showed that one third of all the people contacting their legislators did so because the issue bothers them, and not because they were prompted to by some specific sermon or political outreach.

Foreman: People react to the issue viscerally because that’s the way were raised. That’s why we have to get people to stop and think about it. They just go “Eww, no!” If you look at the way in which marriage and the marriage ceremony permeates our society, you can understand this visceral reaction. Its one of the reason why the support of white women - who are generally much more supportive of gay issues than any other segment of the population - falls off when it comes to marriage. Pollsters say its because you’re getting too close to “their thing.” So many women are raised to believe your wedding day is the most important day of your life, you get the dress, you get the ceremony you get the cake and all the gifts. We have to get people to take a step back and see that marriage is so much more than that.

Quest: We also have to address the fact that when it comes to homosexuality, we’re having an “apples and oranges” argument. The Religious Right has a view of homosexuality that is completely different that that of the scientific community.

Foreman: Yes, but at a certain point, you just have to draw the line.  We have to say “You’re asking gay people to do something that you would never ask any other minority to do in this day and age. You’re asking gay people to go out and introduce ourselves as okay.  We need to show scientific data we’re okay, or we pay our taxes, mow our lawns, etc.”
  We have to draw the line and say “Homophobia is a straight person’s problem. I don’t have to convince you that I pay my taxes. You wouldn’t ask an African American family to go introduce themselves to everyone in the neighborhood to let them know you’re good guys.” Racism is wrong.
  In many ways our community has shied away from taking that head on: Homophobia is wrong. We have to stop taking this on as our burden. They’re wrong. It’s a moral issue, not an educational issue. We have to say “you are immoral, you are unjust, you are WRONG!”
  There are people in our community that say “if only if we could shove the leather people in the background, and drag queens in the background and blah blah blah in the background, then they would just see us as just like they are” are sorely mistaken. They hate us because of what we do sexually. Period. If they’re going to hate you, they’re going to hate you. We have to get way from that and just say “homophobia is wrong.”

Quest: Any last words?

Foreman: I’m very impressed by the lobby day turnout. I really hope that in Wisconsin we can dig in and raise the money needed to defeat this amendment.