Prop 8

The LA Times is reporting that the California Supreme Court just upheld Proposition 8, the ballot initiative banning same sex marriage, by a vote of 6 - 1. This is hugely disappointing

Many blogs will have excellent analyses of this ruling over the coming hours, but right now, I want to point out something of a silver lining that should give hope to all Americans that support marriage equality. As a recent report by the Center for American Progress makes clear, this will pass and marriage equality will likely become a reality all across the country within a decade.

Why? Because today's denial of the civil rights of millions of Americans, this remnant of the culture wars of the late 20th C, remains a non-starter among young Americans of the Millennial Generation. Just as young voters were the only age group to originally vote against Prop 8 (61 - 39%), nationally young voters remain highly supportive of gay marriage.

The Millennial Generation is so huge, that CAP estimates that by 2018, via a simple matter of cohort replacement (old people dying, young people aging into the electorate), a majority of Americans will be supportive of marriage equality.

The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. While we are waiting for that bend, check out these two youth-led efforts in support of gay marriage:

• New Yorkers for Marriage Equality
• Textbooks for Change

Students are famous (infamous?) for contributing to political and social justice causes with their time and labor, but very rarely with their pocketbook. It's a simple matter of disposable income - struggling students don't have it, particularly as tuition rates rise and post-graduation job prospects look dimmer and dimmer. But what if there was a way for students to give with their pocketbook without actually adding to their debt or sacrificing beer and pizza money? A new group of student activists may have just hit on a solution to this age old problem.

Just last week, a group of student activists, in partnership with the California College Democrats launched Textbooks for Change, a website/Facebook Application that seeks to leverage the Amazon Associates Program, and thousands of student textbook purchases, into cash for California's Courage Campaign and their ongoing efforts to repeal Prop 8.

Here's how it works. The Amazon Associates Program allows any person or entity (website, corporation, non profit, etc.) to become a partner of Amazon. Partners place advertisements, search boxes, and other links to Amazon on their site and refer their readers to Amazon for specific or generic purchases (anything from a used book to a flatscreen TV). Partners are paid a certain percentage (usually around 7%) of all business referred. So what is the one thing that all students spend hundreds of dollars on each semester? Books. Textbooks for Change encourages supporters to buy their books through specified Amazon links, recouping 7% of those textbooks costs and funneling it to the Courage Campaign.

The entire campaign is publicized through a Facebook application, through which supporters are encouraged to donate their status, become a supporter, and place an Associates link (a shiny red button as featured above) on their profile pages. One click from a partner's web page (or a friend's Facebook account), and students are directed to Amazon's textbook search page. The rest is as simple as finding your coursebooks.

The student activists behind Textbooks for Change are not the first to think of this strategy. As I have blogged before, the Harvard College Democrats seem to be the first pioneers, using it locally to raise a few hundred extra dollars for their budget each semester. The exciting thing about Textbooks for Change is the way they've developed the strategy in such a way that it can now scale nationally - bringing in significant amounts of cash not just for Courage Campaign and marriage equality, but any number of issues.

While at this moment*, the organizers behind Textbooks for Change are focusing their efforts solely on repealing Prop 8, it's easy to see that what they've created is an ideal template into which almost any issue campaign could be dropped. It would just be a simple matter of swapping out some text on the web page and Facebook App. Transform the Textbooks For Change website into an aggregator of information on all of those existing campaigns, and the organizers behind this may well have hit upon an issue and ideology agnostic platform/strategy for student organizations everywhere looking to increase their political influence and impact.

*I should also note that Textbooks for Change is still a work in progress and the developers will be rolling out new features as the weeks go by. If you have comments/critiques please leave them and I will make sure that they get passed along to the T4C team.

In the last few days, a number of critiques and profiles were published commenting on new/old infrastructure, the campaign(s), and where we're at as a movement. All are worth the time for those looking to get a better birds eye view of the current political landscape.

• Rolling Stone eviscerates the disasterous "No on Prop 8" campaign. In reading the piece, one gets the overwhelming sense that the No on 8 folks ran the equivalent of John Kerry's Presidential campaign to the field and fundraising savvy Bush-like campaign helmed by the Mormans.
• On Tech President, Clinton internet strategist Peter Daou discusses the Revolution of the Online Commentariat, in which he dissects radical changes that occur in politics when information is put (more) equally in the hands of million.
• While the Obama Transition Team continues to innovate, Micah Sifry wonders if the Obama for America team - who met in Chicago this past weekend to devise the future of the movement - is regressing and killing the very openness and grasroots energy that made the campaign so successful.
• Last week, the Alliance of Youth Movements met in New York. Bizarrely, almost no one I spoke to had ever heard of the conference or the groups involved. There are definitely a lot of groups out there claiming to speak for and/or organize youth. Sometime this year we're going to have to build some stronger connections between groups that attend these kinds of conferences and, say, groups that received money from major progressive donors this last election cycle. In any case, some of the conference panels were live streamed and archived. You can view them all here. (I have not yet done so, though the topics look interesting).
• The Washington Post profiles the American Constitution Society. Created to counteract the conservative Federalist Society, ACS is becoming a powerhouse for producing lefty legal thinkers. I'll have to check my copy of Youth to Power when I get home, but I'm pretty sure that David Halperin, the ED of Campus Progress, had a hand in setting up ACS back in the day.
• The New York Times notes that teenagers are getting hit hard by the economic downturn, limiting their opportunities to raise money for school and develop skills to help them in the workplace.

• AlterNet reviews Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. It's on my Amazon Wish List.
• Medill News Service chats with the first Congressperson born in the 1980s. Surprise - he's a Republican.
• The Albany Project alerts us to Republican efforts to challenge student votes in a special election in Queens. The students are being subpoenaed and dragged into court to have their ballots challenged.
• Hah! Supporters of Prop 8 think that young voters will learn to hate teh gay as they get older and start their own families, thus ensuring the "sanctity of marriage" for a long time to come. Sorry guys. Enjoy your victory while you can. You're going to lose this one in the long run.
• In this video panel, the Center for American Progress asks the Colbertian question: 2008 - a great web campaign, or the greatest web campaign?
• The National Journal credits youth, African Americans and Latinos with driving the increase in voter turnout and swinging the election.
• The authors of Millennial Makeover have some thoughts on how to continue engaging Obama's supporters now that the election is over.
• Larry Lessig on Change.gov's shiny new Creative Commons License.
• Andrew Gelman plots the support of Republican Presidential candidates by age going back to 1988. His graph shows some interesting trends. Go check it out.
• Kansas Jackass notes that the local GOP is running claiming around that Obama won Kansas youth because young people are dumb. You stay classy, GOP.

Happy Holidays. Here's what's caught my eye this week:

• The Washington Independent notes that Obama's energy policy is being driven by (young) green votes.
• AlterNet asks, Will the youth movement save the labor movement?
• Daily Kos has data that Join the Impact's anti-Prop 8 protests have changed enough minds in California that the ballot measure would not pass a second time. And they have data to prove it. That's an effective use of the protest model.
• The National Journal credits young voters with Obama's win, noting that his advantage among Millennials is bad news for the longterm health of the GOP. Generation We, YDA and others get good play in this excellent article.
• Oregon local news notes that young people were elected to the state legislature in droves this year, doubling their numbers within the Democratic caucus. Jefferson Smith, one of the founders of the Bus Project, is one of those new Young Elected Officials and he is quoted in the article.
• Netcentric Advocacy gives us the Obama campaign by the numbers. Interesting stats here.
• This is a must read. In the Huffington Post, Jake Brewer of the Energy Action Coalition, son of a GM worker, gives a heartbreaking and insightful account of the state of the auto industry. Word on the street is that this piece is getting read by GM execs.
• MySpace and Change.org are partnering with a number of other youthy and techie c3s to ask for your ideas on what President Obama should do once he takes office. They've got a cool Digg-style site set up to rate ideas, which must be no more than 250 words in length.
• The Obama Transition Team wants your ideas on healthcare.
• The Daily Kos empire expands with the launch of Congress Matters, a new blog that will track what's going on in Congress and offer activists and regular citizens information on how they can most impact the policy process.
• Danah Boyd and some other smarties have finished a three year ethnographic study of digital youth. This should be interesting.
• Engaged Youth has a post up about the "Activism Style of Millennials."
• At Tech President, Micah Sifry interviews Marshall Ganz about Obama's field operation and the upside and dangers of Obama as the first President backed by a full-fledged movement.

Apologies for the light (read: no) posting today. I'm taking care of some personal stuff. Tomorrow I plan to blog about the following stories. I figure you can read them directly now and get a head start:

• Taking on the System and the Prop 8 Protests: Kos talks about his new book and how the Prop 8 demonstrations showed us 1) How demonstrations could be relevant in the 21st C; and 2) How a 26 year old from Seattle used decentralized organizing and put traditional LGBT groups to shame.
• Be + Cause Strategies discusses Obama's win and the importance of infrastructure and organizing.
• Progressive States Network tells us why, even in the wake of a national win, we should continue to strengthen our efforts at the state level.
• Next Gen GOP wants to win back the youth vote. Part I and Part II.
• Amplify Your Voice brings us word of another Millennial elected to office with a little help from Facebook.

Today, all across the country, thousands of young activists will be protesting Prop 8 and the other anti-gay marriage propositions that passed last week. These protests are being organized in a decentralized fashion via Google Groups, Facebook, and wikis.

While most of the organizing is decentralized, the initial impetus for the protests came from a 26 year-old Millennial - Amy Balliet:

Seattle activist Amy Balliett, founder of web-spawned phenomenon “Join the Impact” realized that the site ‐ at that point, only a two-day old project ‐ had reached a certain critical mass, logging 50,000 hits per hour. The “impact” was crashing servers.

Little did she know how viral this thing would become.

“Join the Impact” began as a blog post and email template by Willow Witte, a friend of Balliett’s who had sent the missive to inspire friends after the passage of California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8.

The success of similar propositions in Arizona and Florida, as well as an anti-gay adoption measure in Arkansas, only added gravity to the situation. Witte encouraged contacts to forward the note to their local LGBT groups to solicit plans of community action. Balliett responded to her friend’s email saying, according to a post on the site, “We shouldn’t wait, we need to mobilize now, and we need to on a national level, at the exact same moment, throughout the country.”

And mobilize they did: this past Friday, Nov. 7, ‘”Join the Impact” hit the web. Five hours later, the site logged 10,000 visitors. Apparently a lot of other people shared the young women’s desire to turn despair into resolve.

By midnight, 20 cities’ worth of young volunteers had signed on to organize protests against the discriminatory propositions.

The next evening, Nov. 8, the site had tripled its hits.

By Monday morning, a plan had emerged: Cities around the country would organize their own efforts to coordinate a synchronized protest for Sat., Nov. 15, 10:30 a.m. PST. The movement became officially global with hits from the UK and France, and by Nov. 11, over one million visitors had come to the site.

A friend of mine in California who is following all this said that most of the organizing going on around Prop 8 is being driven by young people, who were the only age group in California to oppose Prop 8.

I don't have time at the moment to go into anything near the detail this deserves so I recommend that you go and read Nancy Scola's reporting on it at Tech President. Calitics will also be covering Join the Impact protests throughout the day.

This is probably the most significant example of young people using technology to organize around a specific issue (not a candidate) since the pro-immigrant rallies organized via MySpace and Text Messaging in 2006. This is an important development in itself and for the LGBT community, and it's something that all activists should be watching and learning from whatever their issue.

I'll try to give this more coverage via a post-mortem when I get back online tomorrow.