Election 2008: Who's playing the gay card?

Earlier this year, when AfterElton.com editor Michael Jensen and I asked an assortment of pundits and political analysts to gaze into their crystal balls and predict how this issue would play out for our "Gay-Baiting '08" article, most of them believed it would be a non-issue nationally, but potentially useful for the right in local races and in the battle over marriage equality in California. And they pretty much got it right.

Carpetbaggers including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Utah, Colorado's Focus on the Family, and the Traditional Values Coalition in Arizona are flooding California with millions of dollars to produce and air blisteringly deceitful anti-gay ads concerning Proposition 8, the amendment to our state constitution to take away our right to marry legally — a right we have today. This would be the first time the state constitution has ever been amended to strip people of rights they already have.

If Prop 8 fails, these ads claim, the gays are going to destroy their churches, send their children to sex camp every summer, and basically destroy the entire fabric of society just as we've done in Massachusetts, Canada, and California itself since marriage equality was recognized in June.

We do this, it seems, by teaching little girls they can grow up and marry a princess:

And those ads are working, too, as recent polls have shown.

Of course, we gays are fighting back, or trying to, because not even my shoe budget was enough to meet the onslaught of out-of-state right wing wack-job dollars. We're ten million dollars down, and thus not able to match them minute-for-minute with this smackdown of their lies — an ad that does a pretty good job of depicting and rebutting not just these ads, but most of the uglier anti-gay ads of elections past, too:

As to local races and more targeted approaches, most of them veer off into the "Is this real or a SNL skit gone wrong?"zone. Take this laughably bad political ad from Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who is running against former Democratic governor Ronnie Musgrove for a Senate seat. Who knew that Musgrove, who is so conservative he's almost not even a Democrat, was a member of the Village People?

I guess Wicker hired the folks who produced these great ads for fellow Republican Sam Graves of Missouri to do his. Genius, really.

Oh, and if you're wondering why HRC donated to a Missouri senate race, well, they didn't. They donated to that radical terrorist organization, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which for dark and incomprehensible reasons is supporting the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Missouri.

Gosh, if only the gays would use our apparently limitless powers for good instead of evil.

And by "evil" I mean, donating to STOP PROP 8! Even if you're not in California, take this one seriously; if you think that our enemies aren't watching this battle carefully with challenges in Massachusetts and Connecticut in mind, you're wrong. What happens here will help determine the fate of our equality for years, even decades, to come. Don't let this moment pass by. Don't let them get away with it.