Albert Einstein once said that “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” As I reflect about the recent nationwide protests in response to the failure of Proposition 8, I can’t avoid experiencing an extraordinary sense of déj… vu.
In the days following the failure of Referendum I during the November 2006 election, a devoted group of students from Colorado State University organized a “Unity and Equality” rally. In less than a month, they mobilized approximately 175 of their peers from colleges and universities across the state to rally at the state capitol to once again demand full equality and equal protection before the law.
It was exciting to watch those young people organize a constructive response to such a devastating election result. This weekend was no less electrifying.
Rallies help to elevate an issue in the public mind. Sometimes, they influence legislators. Most importantly, they give participants an opportunity to vent their sense of frustration when the political system fails to protect them from tyrannical majorities.
But many of us in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community are tired of this perverse cycle. We lose at the ballot box, we rally, we lose again, we rally again but nothing really changes.
Only two states recognize full marriage rights of same-gender couples. Another ten allow some form of legal rights under civil union or domestic partnership laws — undeniably separate and unequal institutions.
Forty states, however, now ban same-gender marriage outright or have passed legislation prohibiting the extension of marriage rights to same-gender couples. Despite their inestimable value, sometimes political advocacy and rallies just aren’t enough. It really is time for the LGBT community to try something new.
In his 1849 essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau summarized two options for confronting an unjust law, political advocacy and nonviolent resistance:
“Unjust laws exist shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded; or shall we transgress them at once?” Mohandes K. Gandhi and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent decades perfecting nonviolent resistance. It has been used to overthrow regimes in India, Poland, and the Philippines. It has also been used successfully to promote social transformation around a variety of issues in numerous contexts. According to theologian Walter Wink, “if we total all the nonviolent movements of the twentieth century, the comes to 3.4 billion people most were successful and yet there are people who still insist that nonviolence doesn’t work!”
One key ingredient that makes nonviolent movement successful Dr. King called “self-suffering.” Gandhi spoke of “tapasya,” an analogous Sanskrit term.
Soulforce calls this principle “voluntary redemptive suffering.” It should not to be confused with involuntary suffering that results directly from overt, structural and cultural violence—when one offers voluntary redemptive suffering, they are, like a mirror, reflecting back to the public an image of what dehumanization and injustice looks like.
Imagine if thousands were to march into their respective marriage license offices, sit down in front of the counter, and refuse to leave until their rights had been recognized — no matter the personal cost — imagine how quickly the LGBT community would achieve equality then!
Christopher Hubble is the lead organizer for Soulforce — a national social justice and civil rights organization which teaches and applies Gandhi’s and King’s principles of nonviolence to achieve “freedom from religious and political oppression for LGBT people through the practice of relentless nonviolent resistance” — in Colorado and a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Colorado Denver.
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