Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

Here is my latest blog post.

Two of my classmates have already blogged about the passage of Proposition 8 in California: Jackie Linge and Robert Voris. In addition, Kate Nocera blogged about same-sex marriage in Connecticut.

For those who haven’t followed the California situation closely, here’s the rundown: Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court ruled that the right to marry is fundamental and applies to people who want to marry someone of the same sex. Since that time, thousands of gay couples had been married in the state. On Tuesday, 52% of California voters took that right away. The text of the proposition reads, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Voters approved similar statutes in Arizona and Florida, though same-sex marriage had not already been declared legal in those states as it had in California.

While California’s domestic partnership law confers most of the same rights that marriage does, the court found that “separate but equal” status is not good enough, declaring that “discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, a characteristic that we conclude represents — like gender, race, and religion —a constitutionally suspect basis upon which to impose differential treatment,” was unacceptable and denied “equal dignity and respect” to gay couples.

For my part, I’m with my colleague Robert. I say government should get out of the marriage business, let religions do what they want with it, and offer civil partnerships to both heterosexual and homosexual couples instead. But many people who probably agree with me on most other issues would disagree with that idea.

Even if I don’t get fired up about marriage from a personal standpoint, when it comes to a ballot proposition like this one I can’t help being offended by it because it’s driven by the desire to deny rights to people. Heterosexual marriages are not diminished by allowing gay people to get married, and I’ve never heard anyone suggest that we should make opposite-sex marriage illegal. So granting marriage rights to gay people can have no negative effect whatsoever on straight people’s relationships. There’s no justification for the anti-gay marriage forces’ position except bigotry.

I actually got into an e-mail argument with a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, John Wildermuth, because he described the proposition’s backers as “supporters of traditional marriage” in this article. My take is, no one is threatening to take away traditional marriage, if by traditional marriage you mean a man marrying a woman. Gay marriage or no gay marriage, men can still marry women freely, and vice versa (even if they’ve been divorced 12 times already). Hence, no one needs to “support” traditional marriage. What Prop 8’s backers are is opponents of same-sex marriage. To describe them as “supporters of traditional marriage” implies wrongly that someone is looking to take away their right to marry someone of the opposite sex.

Since we’ve discussed objectivity a few times on this blog, I might as well bring it up here. Am I in the tank for one side on this issue? Yes, most definitely. But I think any reporter who just repeats what people say and gives each side equal weight with no context might as well be a robot. If I’m going to be a reporter, I’m sure as hell going to call bullshit when I see it. And “supporters of traditional marriage” is bullshit. Looking back 40 or 50 years ago, would you describe white people trying to deny equal rights to black people as “supporters of white people’s rights”? Would any newspaper article today describe white supremacists that way?

Last Monday, I found a searchable database of campaign contributions to both sides of Proposition 8, compiled on the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com. I was searching for this information with the idea of writing about New York City residents who had made donations. After seeing that the contributions from Manhattan included 1,456 to the No on 8 side and just 10 in support of the proposition, and from Brooklyn, 280 against the measure vs. just 2 for it, I settled on Brooklyn contributors seeking to defeat the measure. I spoke with a few of them about why they had donated money and what they saw as the stakes in the fight. Once the measure had passed, my story idea — “Brooklynites Help Defeat Measure in California” — collapsed. But I still wanted to write about it.

Stephen Yuhan, a 28-year-old attorney who lives in Brooklyn Heights, has never lived in California but does have friends and extended family there. “I’d rather live in a just world than an unjust world,” he said. “I do think that passage of 8 would be a real black mark in American political history.”

Gwyn Meeks, who recently moved from Los Angeles to Brooklyn and works for MTV, called herself a firm believer in same-sex marriage equality and counts about 10 couples among her friends who have gotten married since the the law changed in favor of same-sex marriage. “I strongly hope and believe that California will continue to move in the right direction,” Meeks said on Election Day. “Prop 8 would take us backward.”

Voters did not move the state in the right direction on Tuesday, but the historical momentum is clearly on the side of same-sex marriage.