[ed note: Steven Baines, Senior Organizer for Religious Affairs at People For the American Way, is Team Leader of GLAD's Strategic Action Team. He can be reached at sbaines@gladalliance.org.]
Like many of you, I had hoped I would awake on November 3rd with overwhelming joy, but like many of you, I awoke with very little sleep and a very heavy heart. Having spent the final ten days of the election in Ohio, I felt like I was at ground zero. There were no celebrations, no jubilant congratulations, and sadly, no joyous victories, except one. In Cincinnati, where I had worked for over a year with community activists, there was one small but exceedingly bright light in the darkness. With an eight percentage point margin, voters in Cincinnati had repealed the anti-gay Article XII of the city’s charter - the only city in the country to have such a law expressly enshrining discrimination against gay, lesbian and bisexual citizens.
The road to victory was eleven years in the making after voters in 1993 originally decided to add Article XII to the city charter in a bitter and divisive campaign. In the ensuing years, many of Cincinnati’s brightest and creative citizens fled the city and the Chamber of Commerce estimated that the city had lost over $48 million in revenue due to Article XII. After much research and community dialogue, local leaders and activists decided in 2003 that 2004 was the time to act to unite the Cincinnati community through a ballot initiative.
For well over a year, People For the American Way was instrumental in providing technical assistance and field support staff to the campaign, Citizens to Restore Fairness. As PFAW’s Senior Organizer for Religious Affairs, I was sent to Cincinnati in late 2003 to help strategize a religious outreach plan for the campaign. The campaign in 1993 proved that the Religious Right would be well-funded and well-mobilized. I knew that I would have to capitalize on what I had learned from the tactics and rhetoric of the Religious Right in the successful 2002 campaign to defeat repeal of sexual orientation from Miami-Dade’s human rights ordinances.
For eight months, I helped the local campaign staff secure over 100 clergy endorsements for the campaign, including prominent African American clergy and the Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese. Additionally, these clergy were trained in grassroots mobilization and given resources to use in their congregations to help educate their parishioners on the campaign. I also was invited to preach at local congregations including Walnut Hills Christian Church to give local activists a theological grounding for supporting the campaign and fighting the misinformation of the Religious Right. Groups like Focus on the Family and the American Family Association spent nearly $1 million in advertising erroneously linking the repeal effort in Cincinnati to the gay marriage debate that dominated state and local media.
The proudest moment of the campaign for me came in September when I invited the Rev. Dr. James Forbes, a prominent civil rights advocate and Senior Minister of the historic Riverside Church in New York City, to speak at several community events to underscore that this campaign was indeed a civil rights and a social justice issue. Dr. Forbes literally rattled the rafters at New Jerusalem Baptist Church when he preached that the message of the Gospel is one of inclusion, not exclusion and that discrimination against any of God’s children is an affront to Jesus and all faith traditions. He concluded his visit on the banks of the Ohio River at the Underground Railroad’s Freedom Center to thunderous applause when he proclaimed: "This city is too beautiful of a city to be known around the world as the capital of exclusion and intolerance."
On November 2nd, Dr. Forbes was proven right. People in Cincinnati voted to unite and end discrimination against the gay community because they were given the moral compass to chart a new course where all of its citizens would be cherished and equal. In these difficult days ahead, we must take time to rest, reflect and energize, but too much is at stake to simply abandon our quest for freedom and justice. We as progressive people of faith have long possessed that moral compass and great adventurers before us have begun charting the map. Now it’s time for us to chart that course to the glorious morning horizon of full inclusion and equality.
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