Some reflections in the moment that Obama won and Prop 8 passed.
I completely forgot that back in November on election night, someone was taking video of our reactions to Obama winning and to Prop 8 failing. I was in CA for the historic election this year and I felt this video captured the moment so well and the tension in all our hearts that this moment was so great and so tragic at once.
Read more about it here.
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Hi, Samhita - nice video, esp. for those of us in the boonies who didn't have that kind of community around us election eve. But I have to say that as bad as Prop 8's passage was I'm not quite buying "tragic."
Denial of rights to a specific group of people based on nothing but hatred and discrimination is a tragedy. Ergo, the passage of Prop 8 is tragic.
I'm also baffled by your response to this. You don't personally have to find the passage of Prop 8 tragic, but it shows a stunning lack of empathy "not buy" someone else does. That kind of dismissal seems antithetical to a progressive or activist mindset of any type.
You do know that thousands of people married while it was legal in Cali, and now their marriages have been written out of the state constitution, right? There's certainly more than enough hideous and alienating hyperbole coming from our side (comparisons to slavery and the Holocaust), but you think calling it a tragedy is overdoing it?
mos def tragic in my opinion. what makes you say it wasn't tragic? i, for one, was pretty fuckin' sad for weeks, it caused serious rifts between my mormon family and me.
Nice video, Samhita. I somehow did not find out about prop 8 until the following morning, and I believe that spared me an evening of greatly conflicting emotions. I think "tragic" is the best word because it not only captures the injustice of rights refused but also captures the fact that a great failure came in the wake of a great gain. Not to be sappy, but when your heart is open to joy, it can also be most vulnerable to pain.
No worries; I don't have a doubt in my mind that those rights will be regained in the end :)
Prop 8's passing wasn't called until the next morning. All that was available the night before were projections and the votes that had been counted so far. And I think I remember that it had been pretty close, with prop 8 occasionally looking like it wouldn't pass.
this is exactly how we felt. we went to the official democratic party celebration, hoping the mood would be celebratory. but it wasn't. we couldn't take our eyes off the incoming prop 8 results and the inevitable bad news. and we felt guilty - we had made nearly twice as many donations to obama as we had to No on 8, and we had only just begun the week before to phonebank against Prop 8. we should have done more.
I dunno - I guess I feel that if you're calling a local political defeat "tragic" that doesn't leave a lot of room to go when someone's murdered, or their life entirely goes to shit and they lose everything important, or whatever. Not only does "tragic" tend to evoke, you know, tragedy, it also implies a kind of dead-end-ness. I tend to see the passage of Prop 8 as a call to work harder.
I tend to think of prop 8 as a slap in the face, rather than a tragedy.
But.
There are people for whom Prop 8 was a really, really big deal. It wasn't some piddling, insignificant small town issue. It wasn't even the ordinary nip-it-in-the-bud marriage is between a man and a woman political nonsense.
Prop 8 took away people's rights. Rights that they already had. It put the status of gay married Californians in question, canceled any plans gay people had made to get married in California, and signaled to gay people everywhere that the citizens of California think they don't deserve to get married. And all of this in what is generally considered one of the most left leaning, gay friendly states in the country.
That's the tragedy.
Great video!
But I think you mean "our reactions to Obama winning and to Prop 8 passing," not "failing."
Hey Samita,
Thanks for posting the video and contributing! The link is going to expire in T-2 days because that website has gone out of business. So, please replace that video link with the youtube link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmxno55yhyI&feature=channel_page
Thanks!