W. A. Mason in the Arizona "Neighbors You Know" TV ad campaign produced by No On 107.

On November 7, 2006, Arizona became the first state to defeat one of the so-called "protect marriage" amendments. Since 2004, a total of 26 states have passed constitutional amendments prohibiting marriage equality for same-sex couples. In 17 of these states, the amendments go beyond the issue of marriage itself to prohibit other forms of legal recognition for same-sex couples, such as domestic partner benefits.

While the defeat in Arizona was a victory, it does not significantly advance the rights or legal protections for same-sex couples; the Arizona Superior Court has upheld the 1996 legislative ban on marriage equality for same-sex couples and there are no statewide domestic partner benefits. Nonetheless, if the amendment had passed, not only would it have codified this marriage inequality into the Arizona constitution, it would also have prohibited any legal recognition of same-sex couples.

During the struggle to defeat Proposition 107, I was the leader of a nonprofit LGBT organization in the southern part of the state (Tucson). I was involved with the campaigns fighting proposition 107, but did not work for them. The perspectives I share here are influenced by my location within the state, as well as my personal and professional convictions around grassroots community organizing and social justice commitments.

The Arizona Context

The population of Arizona is heavily concentrated in the center of the state, where over 3.5 million people reside in the greater Phoenix area, which tends to be highly conservative and Republican. Phoenix is home to the Arizona Human Rights Fund & Foundation (AHRF) [5], our statewide LGBT organization devoted to public policy, advocacy, and legislative work. AHRF, the most significant LGBT organization in the greater Phoenix area, has a staff of four. Tucson, located in the southern part of the state, is the second-largest city with around 850,000 in the metro area and tends to be more liberal and Democratic. Wingspan, Southern Arizona's LGBT Community Center, where I serve as Executive Director, is located in Tucson and is the largest LGBT organization in the state with 20 staff members.

Our opponent in this fight was the Center for Arizona Policy (CAP) [6], the right-wing fundamentalist Christian organization behind the amendment, with a budget of over $1 million and 15 staff members.

Statewide (Dis)Organization

In November 2004, after 11 states passed constitutional amendments, Arizonans began to strategize about 2006, knowing that CAP was likely to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot. While Wingspan organized in Tucson, AHRF and a few key leaders met in Phoenix. After several months of coordinating separate efforts, the two communities joined forces to create one unified campaign called Arizona Together. Leaders made agreements about overall campaign strategies, and each part of the state selected community representatives to serve on a statewide campaign steering committee.

However, for the first year (January 2005-January 2006), Phoenix and Tucson were locked in disagreements. In spite of early meetings together, there remained radically different notions of how the campaign should be organized. The Phoenix organizers (campaign chair Kyrsten Sinema and treasurer, Steve May, with backgrounds as elected officials) ran a top-down campaign and based all decisions on poll results and on the advice of professional consultants based on those results. Tucson, a strong grassroots activist community, assumed the campaign would be run more democratically, with shared decision-making power and input into key decisions such as deciding upon campaign messages.

In January 2006, the Tucson contingent decided to continue to publicly support Arizona Together so as not to undermine efforts to defeat the proposition, but privately our community continued grassroots organizing, with volunteer-led education and outreach under Wingspan's umbrella. Wingspan provided meeting space, disseminated information through our electronic and print newsletters, and provided staff support to help coordinate volunteer efforts.

Eventually, about eight weeks before the elections, a group of Tucson community members, upset by the lack of public media from Arizona Together, decided to form a separate campaign called No On 107. This provided a much needed outlet for people in Southern Arizona to devote their time, energy, and resources in ways that afforded more control and accountability. In hindsight, the creation of a separate campaign should have happened sooner to relieve the tension and disenfranchisement many people in Southern Arizona felt.

The "Bitter Pill" of Messaging

Messaging was the largest point of contention in campaign, not only in Tucson, but throughout the state. Arizona Together conducted nine sets of polls, and found that certain concepts and ideas, such as "justice," "equality," and "fairness" simply did not resonate with voters. Arizona Together also found that some images, including those of same-sex couples, were generally abhorrent to voters. And, not surprisingly, they discovered that if Arizona voters focused on the "marriage" aspect of the amendment, it would pass overwhelmingly.

The polls showed that while Arizonans are lukewarm about granting new "rights" or "benefits," they also are strongly opposed to having existing benefits unduly taken away. Thus, the campaign message emphasized that the amendment would "take away existing benefits from unmarried couples." When Arizona Together needed a face for the campaign, again polling data pointed to an unmarried, heterosexual, senior citizen couple. Same-sex couples were, for the most part, intentionally hidden from view.

Specifically, in all of its campaign materials, Arizona Together repeatedly told the story of a heterosexual senior citizen couple, Al Breznay and Maxine Piatt: "Maxine and I have been together for eight years. We love each other dearly, but cannot get married because if we did, Maxine would lose pension benefits and we would sink into poverty… Prop 107 will not only hurt Maxine and me, it will hurt over 100,000 families and seniors statewide." Nowhere in these messages was there mention of the rights of LGBT people or of same-sex couples.

Interestingly enough, Arizona Together's message closely aligned with the ideals and principles promoted in the "Beyond Marriage" statement (www.beyondmarriage.org [7]), which calls for broader recognition and legal protections for a variety of family configurations. By downplaying the marriage aspect of the amendment and emphasizing that the initiative would also take away existing legal protections from all unmarried couples, Arizona Together actually embraced some of the arguments espoused in Beyond Marriage. This raises interesting questions about how we choose our strategies -- from political expediency or philosophical conviction. If the polling data had indicated that focusing only on gay couples was most palatable to voters, would Arizona Together have endorsed that tactic instead, to the exclusion of mentioning the amendment's effects on unmarried heterosexuals?

Arizona Together chairperson Kyrsten Sinema describes the campaign as "ruthlessly disciplined" in ensuring message enforcement. This was often a bitter pill for the LGBT community to swallow. While progressives were pleased the message included broader definitions of family, the lack of same-sex or queer-identified images and voices was disturbing to many. Arizona Together raised a total of $2.1 million, the majority of it from the LGBT community, but included few images or stories about queer people and their families.

Many Arizonans, and I count myself among them, felt that this tactic was not only harmful in the long run, but could potentially backfire. We had witnessed firsthand how similar strategies used by the immigrant rights movement failed in 2004 with the passage of Proposition 200. That campaign intentionally downplayed the images and stories of migrants in order to broaden its message about Proposition 200's consequences for non-immigrants. Unfortunately, the message did not resonate with voters and Proposition 200 passed. The damage, however, did not stop there. Because the campaign did not effectively counter the negative images and portrayals of migrants, it paved the way for migrants to be further scapegoated, with devastating consequences as witnessed in the most recent Arizona elections where four new anti-immigrant measures passed overwhelmingly.

Wingspan [8] feared the same might happen to LGBT people. If CAP pulled out its tired misrepresentations of gay people as anti-family degenerates and pedophiles, and Arizona Together, with its focus on unmarried heterosexual couples, offered no counter-balancing positive LGBT images, the results would be devastating. So a few months before the elections, Wingspan produced a set of television commercials, aired in the Tucson area, called "Neighbors You Know" that profiled local LGBT people talking about their contributions to the community through work and volunteerism.

Unlike the Arizona Together messaging, Wingspan's ad campaign intentionally and specifically focused on LGBT people. Here is an excerpt from one of the eight commercials featuring local Tucsonans:

"Since 1982, I have been a family physician taking care of babies, children, adults, and elders. I recently had a patient who had terminal cancer. After she died, her husband told me that she had said she'd finally found a real doctor who treated her as a person, not as a disease. I'm Ivy Schwartz and I'm your neighbor."

Each of these commercials ended with a voiceover that said: "Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people contribute to our community every day. Prejudice has no place in our community. Speak up for the neighbor you know." The commercials were non-political public service announcements designed to support, not undermine, the campaign's work. In the end, CAP invested less money than we had feared in pro-amendment advertising.

(Hard) Lessons Learned

The bitter pill of Arizona Together's messaging seemed to work. By carefully and accurately polling Arizonans, the campaign learned which messages appealed to voters while identifying those that would fail. By consistently and "ruthlessly" enforcing those messages, they ensured that the voters heard them. One of the primary lessons that we can take away from this is that when LGBT rights are framed within the broader context of other familial relationships, the general public is less likely to see them as "special rights" and is more likely to be able to empathize with queer people. Rather than starting with LGBT people as "others" who are seeking rights and protections, the campaign began with unmarried heterosexual couples -- familiar and non-threatening to mainstream voters -- and then subtly inserted gay relationships into that existing framework.

But did the pill have to be so difficult to swallow? It is ironic that this campaign, run by LGBT people using over $2 million from the LGBT community to protect LGBT people's rights, failed to include more images and stories of LGBT people. Could the campaign have been more forthright in sharing stories and images of LGBT people and their families within this broader context? From the vantage point of polling data and outcomes, Arizona Together clearly won. But, what did we as a queer people lose in the process? I believe the campaign's messaging decisions amounted to hiding LGBT faces, and that this was too high a cost to pay -- ultimately undermining our fight for equality. We are in a struggle for equality and failing to name it as such may win us an occasional battle, but does little to advance our rights. If the lesson from the campaign formula is the need to frame LGBT rights within the context of broader family issues, then it is imperative that LGBT rights not be excised from the equation to make it more palatable to voters.

Moreover, I wonder whether even the strict message discipline emphasized by the Arizona Together leadership could have been achieved through a more democratic and participatory process. If the funds are being raised by the queer community to fight an initiative that is, at its core, anti-queer, then shouldn't the campaign leadership be responsive to that community? If not, then to whom is the campaign responsible?

While the campaign succeeded, the election was very close (51.8% against the amendment vs. 48.2% in favor). Several factors certainly contributed to our win, including the shifts in public opinion on LGBT equality between 2004 and 2006, the general discontent among voters in 2006 and their repudiation of Republican candidates and tactics, and the weak pro-amendment campaign led by CAP. (Moreover, the margin of victory would have narrowed considerably without Tucson (Pima County), where the amendment lost by a margin of over 15 points (57.8 against vs. 42.2 in favor). While Arizona Together did important work in Pima County, most of the grassroots organizing efforts were carried out by volunteers organized through Wingspan. Thus, another key lesson is that states can, and perhaps should, consider regional approaches as long as overall messaging is closely coordinated.

Arizona and the Nation

We need to reflect more on the role of these campaigns in the larger queer civil rights movement. More than a decade ago, the fight for LGBT equality began to shift to the state level. As a movement, we have invested millions of dollars in fighting 27 constitutional amendment initiatives, to lose all but one. Each campaign has, out of necessity, adopted short-range strategies to try to defeat the amendments. National queer organizations' dollars have shifted to support these one- or two-year tactical approaches.

All of this, of course, begs the question, is this approach really working? Rather than waiting until we are faced with a crisis and relying on individual states to haphazardly create makeshift campaigns, what if we shifted our efforts to create a longer-range vision and plan for the movement? What if we invested in strategies and campaigns that effect lasting, long-term changes in attitudes about LGBT people and their families? These statewide ballot initiatives also highlight the lack of LGBT infrastructure at the local and state levels. It is woefully inadequate that Arizona, the 17th most populous state in the nation, has so few established, permanent resources for LGBT people. Some other states, like South Dakota, have no organization serving the LGBT community.

We must heed a wakeup call to better invest our precious resources into our local communities and adopt a longer-range vision and plan for advancing LGBT acceptance and equality. The future of our movement depends upon it. Otherwise, what have we really won?