Personal Voices: Knocking on Kentucky's Door

For a moment – as I pulled through sheets of rain onto Idle Hour Drive, a narrow street less than a mile from downtown Lexington, Ky. – I thought seriously about turning around. Suddenly, the idea of walking from house to house in a thunderstorm to ask strangers how they planned to vote on a pending anti-gay marriage amendment seemed, at best, ill-advised.

Sitting shotgun in the steamy car was my canvassing partner, Richard. Looking at the basic facts of our biographies, one might wonder why we – a straight boy who had only recently moved to Lexington and a lesbian from North Carolina – were there in the first place.

Richard and I were among a group of seventeen people who were spending that Saturday morning volunteering with the No on the Amendment campaign. Richard’s girlfriend was part of this group, as was my girlfriend and five other friends from Asheville, N.C. Scattered across the city, we were canvassing door-to-door in traditionally Democratic and “swing” neighborhoods and asking people to commit to voting against the amendment.

The proposed amendment in Kentucky isn’t just your average attempt to ban gay marriage. It outlaws gay marriage, civil unions and domestic partnerships, in a sweeping gesture that limits the rights not only of gays and lesbians, but also of straight people who are not in traditional marriages.

Its language sounds like a stilted press release from The Arlington Group, a troupe of Far Right Players that convened this past year because they felt that the proposed federal amendment did not go far enough in codifying their ideological belief that homosexuality is morally wrong.

This spring, when Bush announced his position on the federal amendment, he did so in part to appease The Arlington Group and to woo his evangelical base to the polls. His stance and the ensuing vote that rejected the amendment made it clear: the issue of gay marriage would play out in the states.

This fall, the question of whether Americans believe that gays and lesbians are entitled to equal rights is on the ballot in places such as Bend, Ore., Jackson, Miss., Akron, Ohio and, of course, Lexington, Ky. The answer to this question will be determined by the private choices that people, such as the residents of Idle Hour Drive, make at the voting booth.

But as I sat in my car that Saturday morning, I was not thinking about political analysis or ballot booths or George Bush. The rain was only getting heavier and there were flood warnings on the news. The long row of modest brick houses lining both sides of the street looked suddenly imposing.

Both my practical and radical friends had advised us against going to Kentucky, which is one of eleven remaining states with anti-gay marriage amendments on its ballot. (Missouri and Louisiana, the other amendment states, overwhelmingly passed their amendments in August and September respectively). My friends’ arguments were beginning to sound compelling. The radicals had insisted that marriage was too assimilationist for us to be working on. The pragmatists had argued that it didn’t make sense to send human or financial resources out-of-state when we should be devoting all of our energy to swinging North Carolina, the newest member of the swing state club, for Kerry.

Luckily, Richard was more on task than I. As we sat in our plastic ponchos, rehearsing our scripts, it was clear that he knew what he was doing.

The content of the script we used sounds at first like the kind of cumbersome rhetoric that only a campaign season can produce:

Hello, Voter, we were to say. I’d like to talk with you about a Constitutional Amendment that’s on November’s ballot. It’s a discriminatory amendment that denies basic rights to committed gay and lesbian couples. We’re asking people to take a stand against it. Can we count on you to vote “no” against the amendment?

Every time I got to the phrase “denying basic rights to committed gay and lesbian couples,” I hesitated, and my stomach turned. I was having trouble with this phrase for a simple reason. Buried in its language was a question that couldn’t have been more basic: in looking at me, a stranger standing on the front stoop, would Voter X see an equal human being whose civil rights s/he would acknowledge and protect, or would s/he see someone who did not deserve equal rights and protection?