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The Art of Politics

"Guns, Gays, Grass and Gums"

By Judy Osborne

A curious feature of Initiative 677's defeat by Washington State voters was the gallows humor that momentarily distracted us from our sadness.

I-677, which would have banned job discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transpeople, ended up sharing the ballot with a whole variety of citizen-initiated issues. One would have legalized medical marijuana, another let dental hygienists work without a dentist for a boss, still another would have required trigger locks on handguns. There were more, but the wag, whose humor I swiped for a title, ran out of G's.

It wasn't funny, actually. We had worked too long, hoped too much, and spent too much of the community's money, to find our defeat amusing. Now we're facing a year in Olympia of hearing legislators tell us the voters have spoken about rights for deviants such as we.

The ballot congestion turned out to be a sheer disaster. In an off year election with little else to attract voters, the multiplicity of initiatives brought out some powerful and wealthy opponents.

Dentists from Maine to Oregon dug deeply into their pockets to keep the status quo, fearing a loss of income otherwise, and terrified by the notion that dental hygienists soon would be referring patients to dentists. The Federal and State anti-drug establishments weighed in against liberalizing drug laws even in hospice settings. The National Rifle Association, as you might expect, aimed its biggest financial and organizational cannons at our State. All three turned out legions of conservative supporters who weren't about to vote for gay rights and who voted down all the initiatives anyway, just to make sure nothing would change.

If it had passed, I-677 would have protected the jobs of transpeople along with other sexual minorities. There was controversy over our inclusion. It took a day-long, stormy session in February for the I-677 board to decide to bring along transpeople. The board wasn't being prejudiced or elitist. Their research revealed that we would cost them crucial votes. It seemed that few citizens knew us as real people, and almost everybody had their own stereotypical images of us when "gender identity" was explained to them in neutral terms.

On the other hand, transpeople in Seattle had worked with gays, lesbians and bisexuals on pride events and political issues for a decade or more. Transperson Marsha Botzer sat on the board, and board members knew many others of us as well. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and straight board members were eloquent in pleading our case, and when the vote finally came, it was lopsided in our favor.

In a compromise made in deference to the research, we agreed to be defined under "sexual orientation". The compromise avoided a red flag that might have flown had the controversial "transgender" word appeared in the ballot title.

Transpeople contributed extensive amounts of time and money to the ensuing campaign, first to gather 229,000 signatures and then to convince the electorate to vote for our initiative. Our contributions were recognized and acknowledged in many different ways. Nevertheless, we lost, and that was the bottom line.

Five factors appear again and again as the reasons for our loss, in news accounts and in our campaign's own analysis. They are:

  • In the campaign's own words, "the $4,000,000 spent by the National Rifle Association in the "No on 676" (trigger lock) campaign turned voters into No Machines. All the statewide initiatives were swamped in this NRA tidal wave."
  • We didn't turn out our voters. Our target voters were GLBT people, women and "Generation X'ers", none of whom came out in any force at all. Numbers were very low even in the most gay and Democratic districts.
  • None of the initiatives struck middle-of-the-road voters as compelling. In an off-year election without many political-party races, only the partisans of the individual initiatives came out.
  • Polling data indicated that the voters who actually voted in this off-year election were far more conservative than the normal mix of voters in our state, almost certainly drawn out by the NRA, American Dental Association, and anti-drug forces.
  • We didn't raise enough money to overcome the single misconception that early polls identified as our problem: the mistaken idea on the part of most people that gays couldn't be fired just for being gay.

Nobody even hinted that we didn't win because job protection for transpeople was included in the initiative. From the very beginning we knew we could be scapegoated if we lost, but we weren't.

Not even the religious right chose to make an issue of transpeople to any great extent. Spokesperson Robert Larimer briefly raised the issue of men teachers showing up for class wearing dresses, but his argument fizzled and the right quickly abandoned it.

Instead, the religious right attacked gays as "sodomites" and "public health risks" and led voters to believe that the initiative would open the door for "pedophilia to necrophilia to porn addiction to be added through court rulings by liberal judges." In a last-minute ad, former Seattle Seahawk hero Steve Largent, now a congressman from Oklahoma, brought out the old but still-effective argument that we were seeking some kind of undefined "special rights".

Right after the election, Marsha Botzer and I attended a post-mortem in the campaign office. Jan Bianchi, the Executive Director of the organization running the campaign, conducted the meeting. She began on a positive note by ticking off the good things that had happened, the first of which was that including transgender in gay, lesbian, and bi political issues has ceased to be controversial, at least in the State of Washington.

That good news was further amplified in a memo analyzing the loss, which said: "Another good result was that the transgender issue never took off as a serious threat to the initiative. We did educate many people and drew in a new group of volunteers and workers."

The Washington Association of Churches, the state's Catholic bishops, and the Jewish Federation all endorsed I-677. Prior to their endorsements, Simple Justice, a network of gay Christians, circulated an analysis clearly stating that the initiative covered transsexual and transgendered persons.

Kristen Pula, one of the two field organizers for the initiative, had direct contact with grass-roots opinion all over the state. She told me "I've heard no one in the community talk about this (the inclusion of transpeople) as a reason for the defeat of the initiative . . . if anything, I've heard members of the organization saying that this has been a good thing -- we've educated gays and lesbians who may not have even thought about the trans issue . . . I talked to people in Spokane, and there are transgender people there having a hard time of things . . . I think we've increased the dialog through the initiative process and people working together."

What's next? Not another initiative for now. Instead, we'll concentrate on opposing bills that would restrict our freedom and equality, several of which almost certainly will be introduced in the next session of the Legislature. Beyond that, we'll be mobilizing transpeople to help elect more progressive candidates to the Legislature.

Soon after our defeat, I-677 organizers sent an open letter to the community which, among other things, listed the many positive results of the campaign. The letter concluded with a more extended view of the future:

Today, these results seem trivial posed against the pain and the magnitude of the loss. But in the days ahead, these results will be the threads that stitch on the wounds, that knit the community together and that weave another path to victory on this course we have set for justice.

Comments, including critical ones, are most welcome. Please e-mail your thoughts to me at heyjude@eskimo.com.

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