Close The Marriage Plot: Inside This Year's Epic Campaign for Gay Equality

Long, but good.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/the-marriage-plot-inside-this-years-epic-campaign-for-gay-equality/265865/

As Amy Simon, the San Francisco-based pollster, watched the Prop 8 fight from the sidelines, it was clear to her that something had to change. Simon's research often focuses on emotionally complex social issues like late-term abortion and euthanasia. She could tell from watching the Prop 8 campaign that the opponents of gay marriage were hitting voters in the heart and the gut while supporters tried in vain to appeal to their heads. "It was so painful to watch," she said. "After the election was over, I was calling everyone I knew, saying, 'Let me in. We can do this.'"

Simon cobbled together funding from a variety of foundations and advocacy groups. She conducted 25 focus groups and a detailed, 2,000-interview survey across California in 2009, trying to pin down the underlying emotional dynamics that were driving the voters who were "in the middle" on gay marriage. A wide swath, as much as 40 percent of the electorate, was neither absolutely in favor nor absolutely opposed to legalizing same-sex marriage.

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What, then, was the better way to sell gay marriage? The first step was to stop calling it gay marriage or "same-sex marriage," which put it in its own category. In the same way clever Republican pollsters once rebranded the estate tax the "death tax," gay-marriage proponents started talking, simply, about marriage. (This has produced some confusing situations, as both sides of the gay-marriage debate now call themselves "pro-marriage." In Maine, for example, the group in favor of gay marriage on this year's ballot was called Mainers United for Marriage, while the anti-gay-marriage group was Protect Marriage Maine.) To liberal audiences, the new preferred term is "marriage equality"; to conservatives, it's "freedom to marry."

The research found that the most effective message was "committed, long-term gay couples doing the same things that married couples do," in the words of a November 2011 Freedom to Marry research memo -- "mowing the lawn, helping an elderly neighbor, and talking about their hopes and dreams." Gay people needed to talk about marriage more: Many assumed their friends, colleagues, and relatives accepted them as deserving of marriage the same way they accepted them as people, when in fact, the same friends often figured that since their gay friends never talked about marriage, it must not be important to them.