Marriage Equality Campaigns: The Difference Faith Makes - Guest Voices

The coming weeks will provide ample opportunity for minute, precinct-by-precinct analysis of how marriage equality advocates secured victory on ballot measures in Maryland, Minnesota, Maine and Washington. We’ll all learn more about inroads made in unlikely communities—African American Protestants in Prince George’s County, Maryland or rural Franco-American Catholic communities like Biddeford, Maine, to name a few. Yet, without missing the forest for the trees, there is one thing we already know for certain: a thoughtful, multidimensional engagement with people of faith made the difference in each of these campaigns. We are used to seeing religion as the problem for the LGBT community, but this year we can say with full confidence that religious engagement was a key to the solution. Here are some of the secrets to our success.

We learned from our mistakes.

Even though a substantial majority of gays and lesbians “cite their faith as a central facet of their life,” religion remains a volatile topic in the LGBT community. Many have been taunted, ostracized, even abused in the name of religion. Painful stories abound of faithful LGBT people and families made unwelcome, even exiled from their congregations. And, we see religious entities fund, organize, and message anti-LGBT work.

Such mistreatment has repercussions and LGBT activists have historically been resistant to engaging faith communities.

Although understandable, resistance to religion has not served us well. The 2008 fight to defeat Proposition 8, the infamous anti-marriage equality measure in California, did not focus enough on religious communities to its detriment. The Rev. Rebecca Voelkel wrote after that loss, “It is naïve to believe that rights-based arguments can trump the value-based arguments of conservative religious leaders. It is also naïve to ignore the power and influence of the moral authority given to religious leaders within communities of faith.

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