think on this.

» Another Post-Maine Perspective on Equality

I read Drew Westen’s book The Political Brain. It’s all about the role of emotion when deciding for whom or what—or against whom or what—voters are going to cast their ballots.

One thing the book makes pretty clear is that there’s only a certain amount of the electorate that’s persuadable.  On an issue like marriage equality, there’s likely around 40% who are dead set on supporting it and 40% who are dead set on opposing it—and there’s nothing any campaign can do to change the minds of these voters.  That leaves a “mushy middle” audience of persuadables that both campaigns are vying for.  That audience of persuadables is likely going to consist of political moderates who don’t have religion-based intolerance of gay people, but probably think less of gay people and hope their children don’t “end up that way.”  That seems to me to be a fair middle-of-the-road depiction of the persuadable audience on these things.

Now think about the strategies that equality campaigns and their opponents are using to persuade voters.  The anti-equality strategy is very simple: take the supposed worst face of the equality movement, put it front-and-center, and tell these voters that the gay agenda wants to turn their children gay starting from the first grade.  Meanwhile, the supporters of marriage equality run a very good, relentlessly positive message featuring gay families—oh, and by the way, that stuff about us indoctrinating your children isn’t true, really.

Between those two, where do you think the persuadable voter is going to turn?  Are those persuadable voters going to vote to provide benefits to other people they probably don’t know when they’re being told that rogue elements will seek to indoctrinate their children?  Probably not.

Opponents of marriage equality are very good at one thing: making people vote against the other cause.  It’s the only thing they’ve got.  And what the marriage equality movement in Maine was very good at was motivating people to vote for their cause.  But what marriage equality movements have been afraid to do is motivate people to vote against the other cause. Best as I can tell, rarely, if ever, were voters told in a repeated, systematized way that their opponents were so desperate to preserve intolerance that they were willing to lie about schools to get it done.  Opponents of marriage equality use fear exceptionally well—and that’s a stronger emotion than the sweetness and light of equality, especially when those voters don’t stand to benefit directly.

One way to counter fear?  Anger.  Make the voters angry at your opposition.  Does that lead to the dark side, as Yoda proclaims?  Perhaps.  But at 0-31, as someone who wants marriage equality for my LGBT brothers in the coming decade, not in the one after that, I figure it’s worth a shot.