Why Seattle's Prop 8 Rally Fizzled

One of the great rhetorical terms coined in the political world is “red meat.” The event at Westlake center planned around the California Supreme Court’s decision on “Prop 8” was just that. The rhetoric of the event was clearly designed to motivate a receptive audience through well worn tropes and familiar slogans; however, it is difficult to judge how well the organizers achieved this end for a variety of reasons.
Initially it seemed that kairos was on their side. The rally was specifically planned as a reaction the Court’s decision regardless of what that decision was. The California decision ended up being a mediocre kairotic event. Unfortunately, by the time 5:30 pm rolled around, it seemed as thought the wind had been taken out of their sails. The first factor was old fashioned time complicated by new fangled communications. The court issued the decision at 10:00 AM, seven and a half hours before the rally. In that timeframe, countless emails had been sent and received, phone calls made, blog entries posted and read, and the cable news circuit was already done with it and back to Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. The conventional wisdom from the legal watchers was that the California Court was going to uphold Prop 8 based on how oral arguments had gone, giving people time to “brace” for the result. Historically, events like the Day of Decision Rally have been cathartic, a gathering of the wounded constituency to relieve pain and shock; the crowd that arrived required no such thing because they had anticipated the result and had already dealt with it.
The rally took on the feel of an overcrowded information session. When a mass of sign carrying chanters arrived to join the crowd, the crowd seemed annoyed that people were making noise. The speakers who discussed the status and trajectory of strategy and public policy in California to overturn Prop 8 in California and to prevent Referendum 71 in Washington from getting on the ballot had the audience’s rapt attention. The speakers who attempted to rile the crowd through impassioned oratory got nowhere. By my unscientific measurement, the most intense noise was for a woman who read a list of organizations who had joined the Equal Rights Washington PAC’s (ERW) coalition against Referendum 71.
Most of the speakers sounded like an LGBT issues “greatest hits” review. High profile members of the community who had turned out in support were introduced to polite applause. Terms like equality, civil rights, fair, and freedom were mainstays of all the speakers. The word “all” was used in conjunction with a number of nouns: people, families, lifestyles, marriages, et cetera. The one large change I noticed in the rhetoric was from a lawyer speaking on behalf of ERW. Historically I’ve known LGBT to be couched in terms of a minority community. The Attorney (I was unable to discern her name) identified herself as “an ally and an advocate,” and used the language of the majority. She made it explicit in the beginning of her remarks that she was firmly of the opinion that “we” were in the majority. Her attempt to refocus the language of the debate was an interesting move, and one that did more to motivate the crowd through simple pragmatic speech than the fire and passion of some of the other speakers.
By assuming the stance of an advocate for a political majority, The Attorney reframed the issue in a way often employed by advocates against same-sex marriage. She took the position that the LGBT community was treated unfairly and that the “will of the people was subverted by “activist judges.” She never used these explicit terms, she was appropriating slogans and topoi of the opposition by alluding to them and making those tropes work in her favor. By invoking the “democratic” arguments of the other side, she empowered the group’s position in a new and innovative way. By adopting the topoi of democracy, majority rule, and the ballot, she was able to imply that what the ballot can give what the ballot had taken away in California. The discourse was one of near as opposed to distant inevitability.
The one new trope that pervaded the event was in the generic form of “we’re winning.” The power of the phrase echoes the tactic of The Attorney by assuming victory “soon” as opposed to an undefined “eventually.” The “we’re winning” topos is especially effective in Washington because of the recent politics on the issue in the state. A domestic partnership law was passed in 2007, expanded in 2008, and Governor Gregoire signed an expansion in to law that makes the law “all but marriage,” and waited a long time to do so in order to shorten the timeframe in which opponents of the law could gather signatures to get Referendum 71 on the ballot. In Washington, it has been a slow progress, and extended campaigns of any kind tend to be exhausting. The “we’re winning” taps into the encouraging aspects of the long and slow road of marriage equality in Washington and uses it to keep supporters motivated. It is a reminder that the situation is not static, and reminds people to look at what has already happened as well as what needs to be done.