If you're reading this and you haven't yet seen Milk, go to the theater and see this powerful film, with an amazing performance by Sean Penn, immediately! There is a strong parallel between the events in Milk, and those we have just witnessed with the passing of prop 8. In the movie, Harvey Milk criticizes the strategy of the anti-prop 6 efforts (the prop 8 of the day) because the anti-6 ads don't talk about people, they talk about the more abstract concepts of rights. "You don't have a picture of a single old queen on this flyer" Harvey Milk protests in the film. His logic was that people would be much less likely to vote for a bigoted proposition like prop 6 if the voters knew that it would negatively effect someone they knew -- don't talk about rights, talk about the lives of people!
It seems like the same thing happened with prop 8. First of all, I think everyone was surprised that it passed at all, since people believed that voters wouldn't want to amend the California Constitution just to strip a minority group of its rights. Second, I'm surprised that no gay multi-millionaire or billionaire didn't just donate $50 million or so to the cause -- what a legacy it would have been to be the one responsible for keeping gay marriage legal in California, which would most likely have caused a domino effect where it would quickly spread across the country. It was huge gobs of money that made it possible to pass prop 8, which means that huge gobs of money would have defeated it as well.
Assuming the Supreme Court rules prop 8 valid (there is still ample hope they will rule that it's a violation of the proposition process), we'll have to create another proposition to restore the rights of same-sex couples to marry in California. The question is, what should the strategy be? First, we need lots of money to counter the huge financial resources of the Mormon and Catholic churches. Second, the ad campaign shouldn't focus on abstract rights, and comparing gay rights to Japanese internment camps and the Civil Rights era, but instead I believe they should just go around the state making ads about how individuals were negatively effected by restrictions on marriage. We need to seize the narrative, and not just play defense by pointing out the lies of the other side. A powerful story I read was about a man whose partner of many, many years was dying in the hospital. He wasn't "family" so he couldn't join his partner as he lay on his deathbed -- as the final moments came, his partner cried out for his name but the hospital staff refused to let them be together. There must be hundreds of stories out there like that -- people who were left homeless because they had to sell their homes due to inheritance taxes, people who lost their children because their union went unrecognized, etc. Go for the emotions, record these stories, and create and play these ads constantly. What do people think?