Is our movement at a tipping point?
By Moof Mayeda, Task Force Senior Field Organizer
I started as a Task Force volunteer working on affirmative action. Who would have guessed that 9 years and 8 campaigns later, I’d still be a Task Force organizer in California? I’ve had the privilege of working on many amazing social, economic, reproductive, and racial justice campaigns during my time at the Task Force, from affirmative action to marriage equality. But the No on 8 campaign stands out for me, because of the paradox of the historic, powerful campaign we ran and the completely devastating loss.
Moof Mayeda at the decision day rally in Los Angeles, CA.
The widespread criticism leveled at the campaign – lies repeated so many times that they became publicly accepted as truth – didn’t help. I never fully recovered. I became triggered and defensive whenever Prop 8 was mentioned. Over the years, I’ve worked on my coping skills, getting better at checking myself. I was resigned that this would be a practice I would continue to hone for the rest of my life. It wasn’t until today that I even believed healing would be possible for me. Today, I can finally put the loss behind me.
It’s so beautiful and inspiring to feel connected with the community by today’s victories. Over 4 years after Prop 8 passed, the individual and collective achievements of the team that worked on the No on 8 campaign are being publicly celebrated today. I am incredibly happy for the same-sex couples who I’ve come to known over the years in California and across the country, and I’m happy for the many organizers who worked on the campaign who have since gone on to do other amazing work.
There is so much more to do. I think there’s another victory on the horizon, a movement-building victory that is continuing to build momentum. This has been an up-and-down week, to be sure, and in the hundreds and thousands of conversations happening, more and more LGBT people are talking explicitly about intersectionality.
The movement-wide conversation about what today’s decisions mean to us in all of our identities, about the setbacks in voting rights, about how much time and money and attention the marriage issue receives, about all the other issues besides marriage that are important to us, about how complicated it all is for queer and trans people of color and youth and low-income folks…I say bring it on. Let’s keep talking about our complicated, paradoxical feelings. Today we are winning more than marriage – we are nearing a tipping point in embracing intersectionality as critical to our full liberation.
