IRELAND YEAH (video Sunday)

How Ireland's "YES" campaign did it

From the Irish Times:

They learnt from previous referenda in Ireland and from previous losses for marriage equality propositions in the United State. They orientated Yes Equality to focus on the “million in the middle”. They also mobilised the gay and lesbian community and their families and friends to intense activity.

Early decisions about tone were key to Yes Equality’s success. In late March we settled on the theme of “I’m Voting Yes, Ask Me Why” an open conversational approach designed to persuade and reassure voters.

A vindication of Harvey Milk, then.  Come out, come out!  And also they needed campaign discipline:

The key task for the Yes campaign was to avoid being provoked into public displays of anger. Instead Yes Equality sought to create a space where the public could see and hear the anguish caused by discrimination and the repression of sexual orientation.

In the atmosphere created by this tone, extraordinary things began to happen. The campaign became one of storytelling. Gay men and lesbian women told of their lives and parents spoke out publicly in support of their gay and lesbian children.

Maintaining this calm and respectful tone required rigid campaign discipline in the face of increasingly nasty messaging from the No side.

They were hugely coordinated and talked daily to keep everyone on message-- and keep disciplined.  And of course, in Catholic Ireland, the bishops were major players.

The only real surprise was the timing and extent of the Catholic church’s intervention. The bishops came in earlier and more stridently than we had originally anticipated. ....

We toyed with the idea of a head-on confrontation with the hierarchy for its failure to distinguish between civil and religious marriage. That would certainly have mobilised our base. We opted instead however to express disappointment at the tenor of the bishop’s interventions while spotlighting statements from dozens of high profile priests about why they were voting Yes. 

And let us not forget the power of the #hometovote movement and the mobilisation of young Irish.

Yes Equality’s focus for the last week was on a massive Get Out the Vote Operation implemented on a scale never previously seen in an Irish referendum. It all paid off.

 There are many lessons here. Just as the No on Prop 8 campaign became a lesson in what DOESN"T work, this one is a lesson in what does.  Progressives on both sides of the Atlantic should take note.

Surprise! (video Sunday)

IRELAND VOTES YES!

The first country to legalize same sex marriages through popular vote. Results are not complete yet but it looks like a landslide!

From RTE

Oh Ireland I hope you did it!

And all those lovely young folk who came #hometovote

Holding our breath for Ireland

The Republic of Ireland will vote on Friday whether to allow marriage equality.  

Although it is polling fantastically well, the numbers have started to slip.

Paradoxically, the high poll numbers are making Yes campaigners even more nervous. Irish voters have a history of abandoning proposed constitutional changes in the final days of the campaign. And the shadow of California’s Proposition 8 — when voters rejected marriage equality in the state in 2008 after a win seemed likely — looms large.

“Look at how Prop 8 happened — Prop 8 was a slam dunk [for LGBT rights supporters] until the result came in and it turned out it wasn’t,” said Brian Sheehan, co-director of Yes Equality, the campaign group created to get out the Yes vote. The fact that pollsters comprehensively failed to predict the outcome of last week’s general election in the United Kingdom hasn’t boosted their confidence either.

Particularly concerning is that our own marriage equality opponents including the masterminds who won Prop 8 are pouring money into this campaign. 

Supporters of a yes vote have accused opponents of a lack of transparency over finances and of accepting funding from rightwing Christian groups in the US.

And while the Roman Catholic bishops are predictably opposed to equality, not all their priests agree:

In at least a few cases, though, Irish Catholics may vote “yes” not in spite of their priests, but alongside them. Standún, O’Donovan and Dolan are among a group of priests who have bucked Church leadership to voice support for the amendment. Speaking to BuzzFeed, The Rev. Tony Flannery, founder of the reform-minded Irish Association of Catholic Priests, estimated that 25 percent of the country’s clergy would vote”yes.”

Let's do this Ireland.  Vote yes!

Survey results faked

There was a  survey last year that supposedly showed that talking to a gay person changed minds about marriage.

It was published in Science, which is the top scientific journal to which all scientists aspire.

Trouble is, it was all made up. 

LaCour couldn’t come up with the raw data of his survey results. He claimed that he accidentally deleted the file, but a representative from Qualtrics — the online survey software program he used — told UCLA that there was no evidence of such a deletion. 

Then, yesterday, Vavreck asked LaCour for the contact information of the survey respondents. He didn’t have it, and apparently confessed that he hadn’t used any of the study’s grant money to conduct any of the surveys.

I hope that the UCLA graduate student responsible is dismissed from his PhD program.  This is an utter failure of academic ethics.

Gallup: support for marriage quality reaches all time high

A new poll from Gallup:

 

Sixty percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage, as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on its constitutionality next month. This is up from 55% last year and is the highest Gallup has found on the question since it was first asked in 1996....

 Are you listening, Chief Justice Roberts?

Supercut: Pop Culture's journey to Equality (Video Sunday)

When did you decide to be gay? (Video Sunday)

Regnerus Takedown

Regnerus takedown: the infamous study by sociologist Mark Regnerus  compared children of broken homes with children in intact homes and said differences in outcome reflected the parents' orientation and not the divorce.  Nowm scholars take his data and re-analyze it. And guess what? It doesn't say what he said it did.(My emphasis)

Many people who he categorized as having been raised by a gay or lesbian parent had spent very little time with that parent or with his or her same-sex partner. Even Regnerus admitted that his data included only two people who said they had been raised for their entire childhoods by a same-sex couple. -

And some of the data were...questionable.

By eliminating suspect data — for example, a 25-year-old respondent who claimed to be 7’8” tall, 88 pounds, married 8 times and with 8 children, and another who reported having been arrested at age 1 — and correcting what they view as Regnerus’ methodological errors, Cheng and Powell found that Regnerus’ conclusions were so “fragile” that his data could just as easily show that children raised by gay and lesbian parents don’t face negative adult outcomes. 

I guess some respondents were just messin' with him.

Cheng and Powell determined that of the 236 respondents whom Regnerus had identified as having been raised by a lesbian mother or gay father, one-tenth had never even lived with the parent in question and an additional one-sixth hadn’t lived with that parent for more than one year. Still more had provided inconsistent or unreliable responses to survey questions, throwing their reliability into doubt. That means, Powell says, that over one-third of the 236 people whom Regnerus classified as having been raised by a lesbian mother or gay father “should absolutely not have ever been considered by Regnerus in this study.”

Reanalyzing Regnerus’ data after eliminating respondents who offered dubious biographical information and recategorizing people who clearly were not raised by gay parents, Cheng and Powell found only three statistically significant differences between the respondents raised by a lesbian mother and those who reported having been raised in “intact biological family” households. Only one of those differences could be considered a negative adult outcome — those respondents were more likely to have had an affair while married or cohabitating. Even that is hardly a smoking gun, says Powell: “If you study 40 different variables or outcomes…just by the law of chance, a few of them should be statistically significant.”

Cheng said that in taking on “one of the most controversial articles published in the history of social science research,” they tried to stay away from the debate about Regnerus’ ideology or the source of his funding. “What we can do is analyze the data,” he said.

Jon Stewart: Rights Courts (video Sunday)