I know many DK readers were sorely disappointed by the approval of Prop 8 in California banning gay marriage, so I thought a little bit of historical perspective might be in order. Specifically, I wanted to talk a little bit about another California ballot proposition.
The following is from my dissertation research - I find some of the similarities between this bit of California history and the recent battle over Prop 8 interesting, and hopefully instructive.
In 1963, the California legislature passed the Fair Employment & Housing Act, which was subsequently signed into law by Governor Pat Brown. As the national civil rights movement lobbied the Kennedy Administration for legislation that would expressly outlaw discrimination in housing, the slow pace of that effort put pressure on civil rights activists throughout the nation to enact such laws at the state and local levels. The California legislation included a Fair Housing Law making it illegal to deny sale, lease or rental of property in California on the basis of race, creed or color. It was popularly known as the Rumford Act. Although the United States Supreme Court had ruled against covenants in 1948, the problem of fair housing had persisted. The court did not find racially restrictive covenants illegal per se; instead, it had ruled against state enforcement of such agreements, rendering them legally indefensible. However, when some minorities had attempted to buy new homes in areas restricted by such covenants, real estate agents developed other elaborate methods of discouraging the buyer, including missed phone calls and messages, making "no-show" appointments and outright lying about the prices and interest rates to discourage them. All that ended with Rumford, which outlawed the covenant agreements and gave redress to minorities who dealt with recalcitrant brokers.
This triumph for the civil rights movement in California, however, was short lived. Not even a year had passed before a state proposition, spearheaded by the California Real Estate Association, had been placed on the ballot for the repeal of the Rumford Act. Using a tool developed in the early twentieth century as a part of the Progressive movement, anti-Rumford groups organized a drive to place a proposition on the statewide ballot for 1964 that repealed fair housing legislation. While the ballot initiative had been originally conceived as a tool for liberal causes against a conservative legislature, since World War II the initiative had been increasingly co-opted by California conservatives as a tool of the right, as with the 1958 ballot proposition in favor of a "right-to-work" law that would diminish the power of unions by allowing employees at unionized companies the option of not joining. The trend has continued, making the tools of Progressive Governor Hiram Johnson such as the ballot initiative and recall practically synonymous with conservative activism in contemporary California, most notably with the anti-tax "Prop 13" in 1978 and the gubernatorial recall election of 2003. Facing a generally liberal legislature and Democratic governor, conservatives in 1964 saw the ballot initiative as the only way to get rid of the Rumford Act.
Garnering enough support in the form of petition signatures to place it on the ballot, "Prop 14" (as it was popularly known) helped to mobilize conservatives, outright racists and a vast middle with grave reservations about the civil rights movement into a powerful voting bloc.
And they succeeded - Prop 14 was overwhelmingly approved, even in liberal areas like San Francisco. But their victory was shortlived. Prop 14 was eventually struck down by the courts, and it wasn't long after the proposition was approved that the thought of denying housing to anyone based on race became a distant memory, not only in California but in much of the nation as well.
That such a reactionary measure would find so much support in supposedly tolerant California - particulary in a year that saw LBJ win an overwhelming victory over conservative Barry Goldwater - made the passage of Prop 14 as unreal as the recent passage of Prop 8. But keep in mind that Prop 14 wasn't the beginning of legalized racial prejudice in California - it was its last gasp. Many of the progressives who fought against that ballot initiative would go on fighting to make California a much more tolerant place, and I hope those who fought against Prop 8 will find a lessson in their example.