Movies and Ballot Measures

I live in Los Angeles' Miracle Mile, a short walk from the city of West Hollywood, which is both a mecca and haven for gays. I've been to my local movie theater twice since the passage of Prop 8, the California initiative to ban same-sex marriage. Each time, the feature came with a preview of the new Sean Penn movie, 'Milk,' about the life of the openly gay San Francisco County Supervisor Harvey Milk, who, along with Mayor George Moscone, was killed by fellow supervisor Dan White in 1978. And each time, after the "Milk" preview, the theater erupted in loud applause and a few shouted derogatory references to Prop 8.

The New York Times reported this weekend that supporters of same-sex marriage intend to use the December opening of "Milk" in their efforts to repeal Prop 8. That's a good idea--organizing needs to be done, so why not piggyback on the millions of marketing for a movie? But the Times treats this connection between a movie and direct democracy as news. It isn't.

In California, ballot initiatives and movies got their start in approximately the same time (the early years of the 20th century) in the same place (downtown Los Angeles, where the first nickolodeons sprung up in the same neighborhood where Dr. John Randolph Haynes and the early Progressives lived and plotted the adoption of the initiative, referendum and recall into the Los Angeles charter). Gov. Hiram Johnson, who in 1911 convinced Californians to adopt direct democracy into the state constitution, spent his days campaigning for ballot measures and his evenings at the movies (which often played ads for his political designs). He was so close to the rising industry that Hollywood's early titans tried to lure him out of politics and make him their lawyer. And in the first few decades of initiative and referendum in California, the theaters often provided a forum to broadcast political ads, in favor of or against various initiatives. An example of a campaign that produced such ads? The 1938 ballot initiative known as Ham & Eggs, a plan to give certain Californians a set amount of money every Thursday.

A more recent example? The recall of 2003. Arnold Schwarzenegger skillfully used his publicity tour for Terminator 3 to talk up the recall and promote the idea of himself as a governor. On the Fourth of July weekend, as T3 opened, petition circulators haunted the parking lots outside theaters and secured hundreds of thousands of signatures for the recall. The surge produced that weekend of the movie opening was so great that the recall ended up with one million more signatures than necessary to qualify for the ballot. (Schwarzenegger had learned that movies and direct democracy worked well together the previous year, 2002, when he led a successful campaign for Prop 49, an after school initiative, from the T3 set, going so far as to meet donors and interest groups in full Terminator make-up).

So what could be the impact this time? It depends how same-sex marriage supporters respond. One unhelpful tactic is the effort to boycott Cinemark, the movie theater chain known for showing independent films but also now known for having a CEO who gave to Prop 8. A better idea might be to use the movie to remind voters of Prop 6, an outrageous 1978 measure known to Californians as the Briggs initiative (after its sponsor, an Orange County conservative), which sought to ban gays from working in the public schools. The initiative lost, but here's the reason why same-sex marriage supporters should make a point of telling the story. It wasn't just Milk and gay rights activists who opposed the measure. Ronald Reagan -- just two years before being elected president -- made a point of opposing it as well. 

A history of the Briggs amendment would point out that he supposed concern about gay influence in the schools -- a staple of the Yes on 8 campaign this fall -- is not a new argument but really an old, discredited one. And supporters of same-sex marriage could argue, with good reason, that even a president who is the hero of religious conservatives understood it was wrong to discriminate against gays.