I should be thrilled with Proposition 8's victory in the California Supreme Court. Instead, I wonder: Why in the world did I have to worry? Seven million Californians went to the polls and voted to define marriage as "one man and one woman." How in the world have we reached a point where respectable people argue the courts have the power to strip those voters of their absolutely fundamental civil rights?
I should be grateful. Instead, I'm mad: Who will hold gay marriage advocates accountable for this effort to deny us of our core rights as citizens?
Nobody. Sigh. So it's on to the next fight in this ongoing war on marriage, on constitutional law and on common sense.
Welcome to my world. I'm sitting on the Hudson River talking to a New York Times reporter, who keeps asking me some version of this question: "Aren't you stretched thin having to work in all the states?"
He's talking about the sudden and (to voters) inexplicable push for gay marriage in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and now New York, in the middle of a humongous and unprecedented economic and budgetary crisis.
He's asking me that question as if I had a big pot of money I had to subdivide somehow -- as if I were Tim Gill, the gay Colorado entrepreneur who put his $100 billion fortune to work in the service of advancing gay marriage by knocking off socially conservative state legislators.
"No," I told him. "My resources aren't stretched thin. It doesn't work like that for us pro-marriage folks."
The top 10 gay rights organizations have combined annual revenues of $200 million. Human Rights Campaign alone spends $40 million a year. Me? I don't have a big pot of money in the bank. At any given moment, I'm no more than two months away from not meeting our modest payroll. I have to go out and raise money to make a difference -- to speak for the people who care about protecting marriage in the bluest states in the nation. The more we do, the more states we act in, the more major donors we find, the more money we raise, the more small donors we attract, the more money and activists we have down the road for the next battle.
These are battles the mainstream media simply don't report, from my point of view. In New Hamsphire, gay marriage was expected to sail through the Democratic-controlled legislature without a fuss. Instead, the issue has consumed the legislature for four months -- much to the dismay of actual New Hampshire voters, who do not understand why politicians are pushing a divisive culture war on New Hampshire in the middle of a grave economic crisis.
In both of the two special elections held in New Hampshire in the past month, the pro-gay marriage candidate got trounced. But you haven't heard much about New Hampshire in the national news media because it doesn't fit gay marriage advocates' narrative: They claim the debate is over; gay marriage has won.
Really? Ask John Sununu, the head of the GOP in New Hampshire, what he thinks about how gay marriage plays with voters.
Two years ago, I was a girl with a pen and some seriously brilliant scholar-friends. Now I run something also genuinely new: a politically effective grassroots social conservative organization capable of interrupting the powerful gay marriage movement.
So what's a nice Catholic girl like me doing running an activist organization? Simple. I looked ahead and saw what was coming: an America in which Christians and other traditional faith communities are going to get rolled -- unless we build real organizations such as churches and mosques and synagogues and temples.
The Catholic Church, my church, will be on the front lines, not because it historically has been the most "anti-gay," but because it has the largest institutional footprint, and because it is dominant in blue states like those in the Northeast where evangelicals are least influential.
Get organized or get rolled. That's the message coming out of California and a whole lot of other places.