Proposition 22 Campaign Wants to Preserve
Marriage With 14 Simple Words

By Archana Pyati

In the heart of Sacramento sits the grand and pink Senator Hotel, a place where Tennessee Williamsâ characters might spend the night.

Upstairs from the hotelâs gracious lobby, solid oak double doors line the hallways. Behind one set of doors on the eighth floor is the office of Charles Cavalier, an attorney and political consultant whose clients have included the Proposition 184 or "three-strikes law" campaign.

During the past year, Cavalierâs firm has served as the campaign headquarters for the Protection of Marriage Committee, the group spearheading the campaign for Proposition 22.

The initiative, which will be on the March 2000 ballot, proposes to amend the California Family Code with, as the campaign puts it, "fourteen, simple words": Only marriage between a man an a woman is valid or recognized in California.

The California campaign hopes to woo voters through an upbeat, positive campaign that capitalizes on the simplicity of the ballot language. They maintain that the initiative does nothing more than preserve traditional notions of marriage and will have no effect on anti-discrimination policies, domestic partnership provisions, and other strides gay rights advocates have made in the California Legislature.

But when the race to win in March begins in earnest, the campaign will have to answer to the oppositionâs portrayal of Proposition 22 as an anti-civil rights measure, one that will forever deny gay couples the financial and social benefits of marriage and relegate their relationships to second-class status.

Yet, the campaignâs strategy early in the game is to keep a low profile and public comment to a minimum. Rob Stutzman, Prop. 22âs campaign manager and former spokesman for ex-Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Dan Lungren, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview for this article.

According to Wayne Johnson, a consultant specializing in conservative issues and candidates, Stutzmanâs reticence is an essential part of the campaign strategy.

"Try to find something wrong with these fourteen words," Johnson challenged. "It makes a certain amount of sense to not be verbose. Theyâre in the citadel right now, waiting for the opposition to define the terms of the debate."

Calling itself "No on Knight," the opposition has seized the opportunity to define Proposition 22 as an anti-civil rights measure, drawing parallels between it and anti-miscegenation laws that forbade blacks and white from marrying that civil-rights leaders fought against earlier this century.

Their slogan, "California is better than this," underscores their claim that the measure is fueled by a homophobic ideology.

Those close the Proposition 22 campaign, however, say that the measure will have no effect on gay civil rights gains, pointing to three pieces of gay-rights legislation signed into law by Gov. Davis in October as evidence.

The first gave benefits to partners of gay and lesbian government employees; the second added sexual orientation to the anti-discrimination policy of the Fair Employment and Housing Act; and the final bill made it illegal to harass gay students in public schools.

Johnson even predicted that the initiative "will pass and at the same time, on a parallel track, voters will continue to support domestic partnership legislation."

"Itâs much tougher to run a positive campaign," said one staff-person who spoke anonymously. "This initiative is a pro-California, pro-sunshiny kind of thing."

And the cloud parting that sunshine is "No on Knightâs" claim that Proposition 22 will corrode gay civil rights rather than simply allow Californians to define what marriage is, campaign spin intended to confuse voters, said campaign spokesman Robert Glazier.

But to Tracey Conaty, press secretary for "No on Knight," Proposition 22 is "not an up or down vote on gay marriage," but a way for conservatives to penalize gays and lesbians for their lifestyle and turn religious values into public policy.

Still, she wasnât surprised that Proposition 22 supporters have so far refrained from negative campaigning.

Conaty anticipated that the campaign will have, in her words, "two faces." One face will affirm traditional definitions of marriage while appealing to moderate and swing voters in districts like the Sacramento Valley, while the other, shown to more conservative districts in the Central Valley and Southern California, will use overtly anti-gay images to sell the measure, she pedicted.

"Thereâs no question that the Central Valley will support this," said Bruce Cain, Director of the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. The Proposition 22 campaign would do well "hold down its losses" in Central Valley districts, which have high percentages of Republican and moderately conservative Democratic voters, according to Cain.

Cain also said that the Proposition 22 campaign is likely to target Latino voters, a strategy intended to appeal to the groupâs assumed religious convictions and break its long-standing alliance with the Democrats.

So far, the only evidence that the campaign has made deliberate attempts to sway Latino voters, who account for 15 percent of the statewide electorate, is a photograph of a young, smiling Latino family on the campaignâs website, www.protectmarriage.net.

If the Proposition 22 campaign is anything like the one that sunk Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehlâs bill for anti-discrimination policies against gay students last June, voters may be mailed something like this: a flyer with a photograph of Latino man and an African-American man kissing with the slogan, "Proteja a los ninos del asalto homosexual!" or "Protect the children from homosexuals."

Itâs unclear what kind of advertising the campaign is planning for the next four months, although TV and radio spots are sure to play a prominent role. According to the latest campaignâs latest financial statements, the Protection of Marriage Committee has spent $100,000 on billboards, a perfect medium for a message that is only 14 words long.

"Billboards can be effective," Johnson said. "Youâre making a major commitment that youâre going to have a message thatâs clear enough for people to visualize. The message has to be something that doesnât need to be explained."

Proposition 22 also received the official endorsement of the California Republican Party at their statewide convention in September, 1998. The Party is trying to sell the measure as "not anti-gay, but pro-family" in the hopes that Californians will check the "yes" box not just on Proposition 22, but all the way down the Republican ticket, said Deputy Political Director Ben Canino.

"Most Americans who support traditional family values would give Republican candidates a boost," he said.

But even conveying a simple message costs money. While the campaign tries to pitch itself as a bottom-to-top operation, a closer look at finance reports reveals a campaign that is well-connected to wealthy donors and strategists from the Mormon church and the more conservative side of the Republican party establishment.

Much of the $3,115,241.48 in individual contributions is reported to have been donated by 740,000 members of the California Mormon church. Leaders of 159 churches received letters last spring from both the Latter Day Saints church headquarters in Salt Lake City and from Douglas Callister, a Glendale lawyer and Mormon elder, asking members to donate.

The campaign has also hired Richard Wirthlin as one of its top consultants and has paid his survey research firm, Wirthlin Worldwide, over $60,000. Also known as Elder Richard B. Wirthlin in the First Quorum of Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Wirthlin served as one of Ronald Reaganâs pollsters and now works for U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch.

Wirthlinâs close association with both the Mormon church and Reagan suggests that he functions as a nexus between Mormon leaders and the Religious Right, two groups that historically have had an uneasy alliance, sources close to the opposition said.

The Religious Right has not shied away from contributing to the Proposition 22 campaign. Knightâs committee and its later incarnation, the Protection of Marriage Committee, paid for expenses in large part due to loans and gifts totaling $522,000 from Howard Ahmanson and Edward Atsinger.

In 1992, these two Orange County millionaires formed a political action committee, Allied Business, which pumped $7 million into the campaigns of the most socially conservative candidates in state and local elections in the past ten years.

The PAC, renamed California Independent Business in 1995, is considered by watchdog groups to have single-handedly transformed the Republican caucus in the Legislature from moderate to conservative.

Ahmanson, especially, has kept the coffers of controversial measures like Proposition 174, the school-voucher initiative, and Proposition 209, flush. He also co-founded the anti-tax, pro-family, Christian-oriented think tank in Sacramento called the Capitol Resources Institute.

While Ahmanson and Wirthlin gave Proposition 22 its financial and ideological backing, it will now be left up to grassroots Christian networks to do the leg-work of the campaign.

The campaign may continue to rely on the efforts of Mark Zapalik, director of the Contra Costa chapter of the Traditional Values Coalition, a statewide group that circulated petitions and promoted the measure through its newsletter and its weekly program on cable television.

Zapalik, 46, has been fighting gay-rights legislation ever since joining the Coalition, whose platform he describes as "pro-life, pro-family, and pro-constitutional," in the mid-Î80s.

In 1989, he tried to fight a Concord city ordinance that proposed to fight discrimination against people with AIDS. In 1991, he led the opposition against another city ordinance to add sexual orientation to Concordâs anti-discrimination policy.

Zapalik sees the campaignâs near invisibility as a sign of how grassroots the support for Proposition 22 is, rather than as a calculated effort to avoid scrutiny by the press and the public.

"Iâm encouraged because I donât see a centralized command center," Zapalik said. "One of the [the initiativeâs] strengths is that it resonates personally on an emotional level. People donât need to be told. Thatâs the beauty of this."

He says that Proposition 22 merely affirms the status quo by validating heterosexual marriage. This, he said, will ensure its survival at the ballot box.

"For enough people who are going to vote, when it comes down to it, the simplicity will be the saving element," said Zapalik. "Once you draw the curtain on the voting book, people are going to vote with their conscience and their sense of right and wrong."

Initiatives have, however, a history that belies the notion of a simple idea with a life of its own. Like all good ideas, Proposition 22 was the brain-child of a single individual, state Sen. William J. "Pete" Knight.

On September 21, 1998, Sen. Knight held a press conference in Los Angeles to announce that the initiative, then called the Defense of Marriage Act, had gathered 650,000 signatures. Two months later, the initiative qualified easily for the March 2000 ballot with 482,044 signatures deemed valid by the Secretary of State.

This moment served as a happy culmination to Knightâs two-year struggle to pass a ban on same-sex marriages through the legislature. When Knight was an Assemblyman in 1996, he tried to pass AB 1982, which like Proposition 22, would have acted as a preemptive strike against favorable court rulings for same-sex marriages in other states.

Co-sponsored by 30 of Knightâs fellow Republicans, the bill passed the Assembly, but died in the Senate when Democrats added an amendment which would have created a statewide domestic partnership registry, giving same-sex couple benefits associated with marriage.

Democrats knew that Gov. Pete Wilson would veto the bill if it arrived on his desk with domestic partnership legislation attached.

Sure enough, Wilson killed AB 1982, but it was Lieutenant Gov. Gray Davis who dealt the fatal blow. Acting as the Senate president, Davis cast the tie-breaking vote to keep the domestic partnership provisions in the bill, gutting it of its original purpose and outraging its sponsor.

Knight tried again later on in 1996, with AB 3227 and lent his support to SB 2075, a measure sponsored by Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside) which sought to bar recognition of not only same-sex marriages, but of common-law unions as well. None of these measures got very far in legislature dominated by Democrats.

It was with these defeats in mind that in early 1998, Knight decided to circumvent the Legislature entirely. Shortly after the measure qualified, Knight spokesman Andy Pugno told the San Francisco Examiner that his boss was using the initiative process because the Legislature "refused to protect Californiaâs current definition of marriage."

Knight then formed a committee, Californians for the Defense of Marriage, which would spend the next eleven months gathering signatures and amassing grassroots support from its headquarters in Tustin.

For $179,000 Knightâs committee hired Arno Consultants, the signature-gathering firm best known for putting three controversial measures on statewide ballots: Proposition 187, which sought to deny health benefits to illegal immigrants and was later tossed out by the courts, Proposition 184, the "three-strikes" initiative, and Proposition 209, the initiative that eliminated state-sponsored affirmative action programs.

Knightâs committee also tapped into the statewide network of the Christian Coalition, paying $6,288.50 to the statewide headquarters in Tarzana, $8,000 to the San Diego chapter, and $1,000 to the Orange County chapter to gather signatures.

Miriam Archer, director of the statewide group, recalled receiving letters from Coalition headquarters in Virginia and from Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family in Colorado, urging Coalition members to sign and circulate the petition.

"Everybody felt that marriage should be between a man and a woman," she said. "That was the way it was instituted in the Bible originally. Nobody wanted that changed."

Archer said that "it didnât take a lot of convincing for parishioners because they all wanted to sign." She estimates that the Coalition collected 100,000 signatures for the measure.

Echoing Knightâs sentiment about the power of direct democracy, Archer felt that the initiative process was the only way for conservative voters to get their voices heard.

"Unfortunately, we donât elect people who represent us," she said. "You do feel like youâre butting your head against a stone wall."

Another issue that supporters say is at stake in the debate about Proposition 22 is a stateâs right to defend itself against federal authority and interference.

"People thought that we were safe when President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996," said Zapalik, likening Proposition 22 to a dose of "preventative medicine" to keep the gay-rights lobby from furthering its agenda in California state politics.

Zapalik said it was a "challenge" to convince potential supporters that California had to define marriage for itself, given that the Vermont Supreme Court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of marriage requests of three same-sex couples later on this year.

"From my perspective, this initiative is going to allow California to determine its own destiny. We knew we had to do something," he said.

That something has also included distancing itself from Sen. Knight, so that the initiative isnât perceived by voters to be either a one-man smear campaign against gays or as a fatherâs ire against his son, David Knight, for coming out as a gay man.

Instead, supporters rally around Proposition 22 as an expression of the Peopleâs will, pointing to a double-digit approval rating in recent Field Polls.

"This thing has its own life" Zapalik said with confidence. "Itâs official, itâs on the ballot and I really think itâs going to pass on the merit of the question, rather than on the campaign."