National Day of Protest Against Prop. 8
By Emily Rutherford - Nov 17th, 2008 at 9:27 am
On Saturday, folks in at least one city in each of the 50 states gathered together at exactly the same time (10:30 Pacific; 1:30 Eastern) to protest the passage of Proposition 8 in California, and the similar measures in Arizona and Florida. Andrew Sullivan has posted great reports and photos from readers from all over the country if you’d like to get a sense of the magnitude of Saturday’s gatherings. The crowds in California were, naturally, large–my hometown, San Diego, had 20,000 protesters who marched on the County Administration Center at the harbor; I myself was in a crowd of 4,000 at Broadway and Park Avenue by New York City’s City Hall, where we waved our signs in solidarity with our fellow Americans on the West Coast.
I had actually gone to the protest with the intent of reporting on the story for my college newsweekly, but jumping up and down trying to snap terrible-quality cellphone pictures over the heads of the crowd was much less exciting than joining in my first protest chant: “What do we want? Civil rights! When do we want them? Now!” I took in the signs of every description, from “Straight, Catholic, and against Prop. 8″ to “No more Mr. Nice Gay!”
At just about 1:30 on the dot the people around me murmured that speakers had taken to a stage. As the first openly gay member of the New York City Council made a speech, I pushed my way through the crowd to a spot standing on a fence, with better visibility; as some gay men’s chorus or other sang the national anthem, I eagerly snapped cellphone pictures of people waving their signs in the air; as a gay woman who was on America’s Next Top Model spoke, I watched the NYPD block off one, then two, then three lanes of Broadway as the ranks of the protesters swelled. I cheered and applauded for civil rights and marriage equality, and waved with the rest of the crowd at all the tour buses going by, many of which honked their horns at us in solidarity.
It was exhilarating when one speaker urged us to all take out our phones, call our state senators, and ask them to fight for marriage equality in New York in 2009. Despite not being a New Yorker, I played along, and no one chanted louder than I when one speaker started a refrain of “Yes we can!”
I saw two girls try to jump the fence I was sitting on and almost get themselves arrested for it, but other than that, everyone was perfectly peaceful and cordial, and the last thing the protest’s organizers said at 3:30, when they wrapped up their series of speeches, was that the police had done a great job and we should thank them on the way out. That got nearly as loud a cheer as any of the many exhortations to fight for equality.
I come from a relatively conservative city, and now I go to Princeton University, so I haven’t had much exposure to such “dens of iniquity.” I gather that no den is more iniquitous than the City itself, but standing on Broadway between Park and Murray amidst the most iniquitous of them all, I saw little kids on their moms’ and dads’ shoulders, young couples holding hands, parents with their adult children, and many groups of friends cheering exuberantly.
Some had multiple piercings or brightly-colored hair; some sported collars and chains; one woman rather memorably wore a t-shirt that said “I like vag” in enormous letters across her chest. But all were there to fight for the right for themselves, their friends and family, and their ideological brothers and sisters in California, Arizona, and Florida to be able to do one of the most conventional things in the world. All they were asking for was marriage, as an end in itself and as a symbol of all the civil rights that go with it. If that’s iniquity, I’m on board with it, and I’m glad I stood on a railing and cheered for the rights I believe in.
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