Gay Marriage Advocates Turn to Social Media for Prop. 8 Repeal Effort

Love Honor Cherish … and tweet? The first three refer to a group that fights for marriage equality, and the latter refers to one of the tools the group will harness in order to make that goal a reality. This week the nonprofit unveiled SignforEquality.com, which advocates hope will collect enough online signatures to put a measure on the ballot that would repeal California’s Prop. 8.

The group boasts that its effort marks “the first time that social networking technology has been used to qualify a California initiative for the ballot.” But, as LA Weekly pointed out, California is still reluctant to embrace certain digital aspects of the democratic process, so the group has had to work around technical issues by making the forms available for downloading – supporters then fill them out by hand and mail them in.

As I chronicled recently, the move to put the gay marriage issue back on the ballot so quickly is a controversial one. A recent L.A. Times poll found that although a slight majority of Californians say they favor same-sex marriage legalization, almost 60 percent said they didn’t want to revisit the issue in 2010.

But a part of the population – even if it’s a big part – wanting the issue put to bed isn’t a good enough reason to keep other people’s lives are on hold until they can legally be married. My last boss once got exasperated with me after I mentioned something involving gay marriage and demanded to know how I could possibly care about something so much when it didn’t directly affect me. I’m not sure what I said – but I certainly have just as hard of a time understanding how other people can live their lives without caring about what has rightly been characterized as the civil rights test of our generation.

So, whether it bothers others or not, I will vote for gay marriage in 2010. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll vote for it again in 2012, and in 2014, and every year it appears on a ballot before me until we get it right.