Netroots Nation 2012 - Marriage Equality: Past, Present and Future

So the last session I attended today was the above titled Marriage Equality: Past, Present and Future.

Mostly it was about what is going on in California, Minnesota, and Washington State.

They did touch on the opposition side using the children, something I’ve long said is disingenuous of the bigots.

Another thing touched on was someone saying they’d like to see an app on Facebook where you can run your friends against the voter registration database. Be pretty simple to do it, but there is one thing I have to say:

When I did database work for Marriage Equality Rhode Island one of the things I did was to dedupe their list of 70,000 which compressed down to about 55,000. Then I ran that list against the RI Voter Registration Database and realized something. To normalize I stripped out anyone who didn’t put RI as their state. Then when I ran it against the voter registration database I did so on fname, lname, city, zip.

Twisted it every which way and the sad fact was, that < 30% of the people who supported marriage equality were actually registered to vote.

But the speaker from California showed an interesting video. They're going out and interviewing people who voted for Prop 8. They show them the bigot's 'Princes' ad, and then an ad they produced. Additionally they ask the people if they support marriage equality, once at the beginning and end, then twice in the middle.

What they find is people who are exposed to the new ad are more likely to support marriage equality.

Only proves what I've known for some time, that you have to know and have talked to someone that's gay before you realize we're not all child molesters and monsters. The opposition knows this and it's what they play on with their 'Prince' ads.

Other than that the hour passed quickly but turnout wasn't what I expected. There were 218 seats in the room and less than half were filled.