Prop 8 Trial Re-Enactment, Day 3 Chapter 3

San Francisco City and County Attorney Therese Stewart wraps up the re-direct examination of the Plaintiffs' expert witness Professor George Chauncey.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Christopher Dusseault then begins direct examination of Letitia Anne Peplau, a Harvard educated social psychologist on the psychology faculty at UCLA, an expert on close personal relationships, sexual orientation, and gender. Ms. Peplau adds to the plaintiffs’ story by testifying that Proposition 8 hurts gay people who would benefit from marriage. She also testified that Proposition 8 does not harm opposite-sex marriage, which strips the defendants of their only "good" reason for passing Proposition 8, HAHAHA.

She testifies, based on her own research and other experts’ work, that for those adults who choose to marry, marriage is often associated with a wide range of important material, emotional and spiritual benefits, partly due to the revered status of marriage in society; that there are remarkable similarities between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples in respects such as relationship satisfaction, commitment, and stability; that same-sex couples will likely enjoy the same benefits from civil marriage that different-sex couples currently enjoy, consistent with self-reports from same-sex couples who married in Massachusetts (only more so when same-sex marriage is legal nationwide); and that allowing same-sex couples to marry will not harm heterosexual marriage, neither causing fewer different-sex couples to marry nor causing more of them to divorce. She explains that same-sex couples married when it became legal in Massachusetts at higher rates than they had entered civil unions or domestic partnerships. She concludes her direct testimony by noting that the existence of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts for four years has had zero affect on opposite-sex marriages.




Kudos to MarriageTrial.com.

Prop 8 Trial Re-Enactment, Day 3 Chapter 2

The Defense-Intervenor's Attorney David Thompson completes his cross-examination of the Plaintiffs' expert witness Professor George Chauncey on discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the history in the United States. The SF City and County Attorney Therese Stewart, redirects the witness.

As the day opens, Attorney David Thompson confronts Chauncey with all manner of evidence, including his own work that things have not changed for the better for gays and lesbians in the United States and trying to get him to concede on the stand that gay men and lesbians have amassed significant political power in the US. Chauncey stoutly tries and succeeds to limit the effect of his prior statements by insisting that the improvements are incomplete due to political polarisation. THANK YOU, CLINTON. THANK YOU, ROVE. THANK YOU, BUSH. He also asserts that the process of integrating gays into American social life slowed or stopped in 2004, when a bunch of states passed Proposition-8-like initiatives to utterly ban gay and lesbian marriage, and sometimes civil unions, explicitly in their state constitutions. Chauncey resists and insists that such these ballot question setbacks and other forms of antigay discrimination is based on a view that same-sex relationships are unequal and inferior. Thompson makes the big mistake of not restricting Chauncey to simply saying yes or no.

Chauncey scored a very important point against the D-I Team, disputing their claim that being taught about same-sex marriage is bad for children. As revealed during the trial's first day, the Yes On 8 Campaign included a TV commercial relating how a Massachusetts grade school now includes fairy tales that end with the prince marrying the prince. Cross-examining gay plaintiff Paul Katami on Day One, defense lawyer Raum backed him up into a corner and managed to get him to waffle on whether or not parents could legitimately object to that, cleverly conflating the meaning of “morality,” and implying that any mention of homosexual marriage is tantamount to sex education! Again, Thompson makes the strategic error of trying to back Professor Chauncey into the same corner! Describing the Massachusetts fairy tale ad: “Is it reasonable for parents who morally disapprove of homosexuality to want to wait until the fifth or sixth grade for those sorts of issues to be taught in public school?”

Instead of being derailed by the red herring about sex, Chauncey immediately sees through the question: “Well, would you say that people who morally disapprove of racial equality or racial marriage should be able to insist that no books showing black and white people as equal or black and white people in relationships should be kept out of the schools?”

And then Chauncey drives the point home, skewering the old magical thinking that exposure of children to even the mention of LGBT people will automatically make the little tykes gay: “And in this case the child is simply being exposed to the existence of gay people. And I take note that the parents don't express concern just about marriage, but about homosexuality at all.”

On Therese Stewart's redirect, Chauncey reiterates that the Proposition 8 ballot question itself said nothing about children or what parents can teach them or what they’re taught in school. He clarified that there have long been people whose attractions today might lead them to be identified as gay; that there had been African Americans who questioned integration as a goal; that the progress made by lesbigay people in quarters such as academia has been only partial; that the majority of religious institutions and their congregants still oppose same-sex couples’ marrying and even “homosexuality”; that such religious views can be affected by anti-gay stereotypes, which were dredged up by Yes on 8 and other antigay campaigns before and since. He further stressed that these sorts of campaigns invariably reduce LGBT people to the sex act, essentially turning us into animals and "unnatural" ones at that!: "It focuses entirely -- it suggests the focus on homosexuality entirely as a matter of sexuality, not love, not relationships. This is actually a book about two princes falling in love and it's a fairy tale. It doesn't talk about sex. It's another fairy tale that seems appropriate to that age."

This is critical! Reducing us gay men and lesbians to absolutely nothing but sex and then invoking the sexual innocence of children has been a very effective strategy for the opponents of gay marriage, who prey on the magical thinking of misinformed people! Chauncey reveals what is really going on: libel, slander, and defamation of character in a smear campaign worthy of Goebbels! Would Thompson say that people who disapprove of interracial marriage should be allowed to pull their children out of school when they study the civil rights movement? HAHAHA.






Many thanks to to MarriageTrial.com.

Prop 8 Trial Re-Enactment - Day 2 Chapter 5

Therese Stewart, Attorney for the City of San Francisco, conducts the direct examination of Yale professor George Chauncey of Yale University, is the leading expert in the country on the history of gay life in America. Chauncey’s testimony will address factors previously treated as relevant to the level of scrutiny, that is, how deferential or skeptical courts will be toward government, certain kinds of discrimination receive under the 14th Amendment of our Constitution. It took two transcript paragraphs to list the prizes won by his book, “Gay New York,” (I read that, it's at the Boston Public Library) which included a trail-blazing analysis of how discrimination against homosexuals (especially gay men) developed alongside the repeal of Prohibition in the early 1930’s (the Hayes committee is one notorious example -- it eliminated gay visibility in the movies) and with the rise of McCarthyism after World War II (a Lavender Scare grew up and exceeded the Red Scare). So his testimony is about how lesbians and gay men were made a "suspect class" for benefit of the hetero majority only, and have suffered widespread and acute discrimination and fearmongering over the course of the 20th Century. He explains how more than just sodomy laws were used to try to keep gay and lesbian people even from patronizing and gathering in bars, how military anti-gay policy came about, persecution and purging of gay and lesbian government employees and even priivate sector employees and the enabling of hate crimes. The bloody discrimination reinforced enduring patterns of anti-gay prejudice and hostility, forcing lesbians and especially gay men to endure the toll of the closet. The closet made LGBT people utterly invisible and has perpetuated “demonic stereotypes” of gay people, including past and present themes of gay men and lesbians as threats to children starting in the '50s, the latest examples being the images of such threats presented in the media in support of Proposition 8. He explains thoroughly that which the plaintiffs are arguing: these scare tactics were a form of irrational prejudice deployed in the Yes on 8 campaign to secure passage of the proposition.

Chauncey has agreed with most modern historians that homosexuality as a category of humanity was discovered only in the late 19th Century. Before that, law and society focused on the acts themselves (sodomy, etc.) and assumed they would come and go in many peoples’ lives. So Thompson, cross-examining again, presses Chauncey to admit that the category “homosexual” is a fluid one with distinctions between acts and identities, and that it’s not exactly clear what it means. As the day ends, Thompson’s cross-examination of Professor Chauncey has only just begun.

Prop 8 Trial Re-Enactment, Day 2 Chapter 4

Therese Stewart, Attorney for the City of San Francisco, conducts the direct examination of Yale professor George Chauncey of Yale University, is the leading expert in the country on the history of gay life in America. Chauncey’s testimony will address factors previously treated as relevant to the level of scrutiny, that is, how deferential or skeptical courts will be toward government, certain kinds of discrimination receive under the 14th Amendment of our Constitution. It took two transcript paragraphs to list the prizes won by his book, “Gay New York,” (I read that, it's at the Boston Public Library) which included a trail-blazing analysis of how discrimination against homosexuals (especially gay men) developed alongside the repeal of Prohibition in the early 1930’s (the Hayes committee is one notorious example -- it eliminated gay visibility in the movies) and with the rise of McCarthyism after World War II (a Lavender Scare grew up and exceeded the Red Scare). So his testimony is about how lesbians and gay men were made a "suspect class" for benefit of the hetero majority only, and have suffered widespread and acute discrimination and fearmongering over the course of the 20th Century. He explains how more than just sodomy laws were used to try to keep gay and lesbian people even from patronizing and gathering in bars, how military anti-gay policy came about, persecution and purging of gay and lesbian government employees and even priivate sector employees and the enabling of hate crimes. The bloody discrimination reinforced enduring patterns of anti-gay prejudice and hostility, forcing lesbians and especially gay men to endure the toll of the closet. The closet made LGBT people utterly invisible and has perpetuated “demonic stereotypes” of gay people, including past and present themes of gay men and lesbians as threats to children starting in the '50s, the latest examples being the images of such threats presented in the media in support of Proposition 8. He explains thoroughly that which the plaintiffs are arguing: these scare tactics were a form of irrational prejudice deployed in the Yes on 8 campaign to secure passage of the proposition.

Chauncey has agreed with most modern historians that homosexuality as a category of humanity was discovered only in the late 19th Century. Before that, law and society focused on the acts themselves (sodomy, etc.) and assumed they would come and go in many peoples’ lives. So Thompson, cross-examining again, presses Chauncey to admit that the category “homosexual” is a fluid one with distinctions between acts and identities, and that it’s not exactly clear what it means. As the day ends, Thompson’s cross-examination of Professor Chauncey has only just begun.