No on 8, final week

After taking a week's vacation I'm back home and back into the final week of the No on 8 campaign.

I was driving around Santa Clarita this afternoon with my back seat full of about 50 No on 8 campaign signs that I had picked up earlier this morning at the campaign office near my house in Silver Lake. Silver Lake is quite liberal and is one of the two main "gay neighborhoods" in Los Angeles, though much less so than West Hollywood. So it's no surprise that there's a campaign office near my house. Santa Clarita, where my church is located, is another story: highly conservative, a large Mormon population (the majority of Yes on 8 money comes from Mormon donors) and the original Proposition 22 sponsor (the proposition from 7 years ago that created the one man/one woman marriage law that the California Supreme Court recently overtuned) was a state senator from the Santa Clarita area named Pete Knight.

I turned the corner at one busy intersection and was surprised to see about 6 teenagers holding handmade signs. I slowed down enough to read one of them and was pleasantly surprised it read No on 8. I gave a thumbs up and then turned into a parking lot, grabbed a half dozen professional signs from the back of my car and gave them to the sign wavers. A few miles away I drove through a second intersection and came across an even larger number of No on 8 teenagers. I gave them signs too. At last I arrived at Starbucks, my destination, went to the bathroom and saw that someone had stuck a handmade sticker on the wall using a mailing label on which they had written, "Be fair, be equal, No on 8."

I'm on my way tonight to our phone bank. Phone bank again tomorrow. Then demonstrations and press conferences the rest of the week and weekend until election day.