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Symposium: The Good Representative 2.0
In the wake of the 2008 passage of California's Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that reinstated that state's ban on same-sex marriage (SSM), advocates and activists struggled to understand what had happened and to strategize for the fight that lay ahead. As part of these deliberations, a widely circulated report from the centrist advocacy group The Third Way argued that to convince "swing voters" to support SSM, they must be convinced "that gay couples want to marry for similar reasons that other couples do"--that is, "to build a life together based on love and commitment, staying together through thick and thin."1This approach formed the backbone for strategies in subsequent battles over SSM in states including Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota, seemingly to great avail: in 2012, voters in Washington, Maine, and Maryland approved initiatives allowing SSM. An anti-SSM ballot initiative was defeated in Minnesota, paving the way for subsequent passage of its "Freedom to Marry" law, making it among the first states to prevent a popular vote against SSM as well as to achieve SSM legislatively (Levine, Proctor, and Strolovitch 2015).
Around the same time that Third Way began this work, another set of activists formed a new online advocacy collective called Against Equality. Its stated goal was to challenge "the demand for inclusion in the institution of marriage, the US military, and the prison-industrial complex." The following excerpt from its webpage is emblematic of its approach:
We hear rumors that...the children of gay married couples are healthier, wiser, kinder; that they can and do beat up the nasty illegitimate spawn of those who dare to remain unmarried...that the cats of married gay men regularly crap nuggets of gold...[M]ainstream gays and lesbians...insist that they are more moral and hence more deserving than sluts like us...We wish that the [SSM] crowd would simply cop to it: Their vision of marriage is the same as that of the Right, and far from creating FULL EQUALITY NOW!...gay marriage increases economic inequality by perpetuating a system which deems married beings more worthy of the basics like health care and economic rights.2
Third Way's representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people as committed, monogamous, and "just like" straight...