Thread by @sissenberg

If you want to understand why former Green Party campaigner @kyrstensinema is so enamored with bipartisanship and has such disdain for lefty activists, I have a story for you about something that happened #OnThisDay 15 years ago. —>

Between 1998 and 2006, 27 states passed ballot measures amending their Constitutions to ban same-sex marriage. Nearly all passed safely, many by lopsided margins. On November 7, 2006, Arizona became the first state to vote down a gay-marriage ban. —>

Proposition 107 went farther than nearly any other state. Besides restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples, it declared “Arizona and its cities, towns, counties or districts shall not create or recognize a legal status for unmarried persons that is similar to marriage.” —>

The lead committee organized to fight Prop 107 was called Arizona Together. The coalition was led by two state legislators: Republican Steve May (@BookofSteve), who had been discharged from the Army for being openly gay, and freshman Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, a bisexual. —>

@BookofSteve Sinema had entered politics as an active Green Party member and organizer of local protests against the Iraq war. When elected to the legislature in 2004, she was still a law student whose research and writing focussed on LGBT civil-rights issues. —>

From the outset, however, Sinema and May antagonized local activists with the way they organized the Arizona Together campaign, as Tucson gay-rghts activist Kent Burbank wrote. —>

Polling showed that voters did not respond to the activists’ preferred language about “equality” and “justice,” and were reticent about granting new rights. But a strong majority opposed “taking away existing benefits from unmarried couples.” From @BallotStrategy report: —>

That led Sinema and May to develop a strategy that entirely ignored Prop 107’s impact on same-sex marriages, then legal in only one state and unlikely to come to Arizona any time soon. —>

Instead they aimed Arizona Together messaging at Prop 107’s ban on “legal status for unmarried persons...similar to marriage,” which presumably would outlaw a handful of programs statewide, including Tucson's domestic-partner registry open to both gay and straight couples. —>

All of Arizona Together’s ads focused on these potential victims of Prop 107, with much of the communication spotlighting an unmarried heterosexual senior couple who would lose pension benefits if the amendment passed. —>

The activists already skeptical about Sinema’s leadership hated this approach, especially when they saw that not a single Arizona Together ad included gay or lesbian couples or addressed the struggle of LGBT people, as Burbank wrote. —>

During the campaign, Sinema also managed to antagonize folks on left and right with a bizarre rant to a local magazine against “this supposed New Feminism.” (In the same interview, she proudly called herself “a Prada socialist.”)

During the campaign, Sinema also managed to antagonize folks on left and right with a bizarre rant to a local magazine against “this supposed New Feminism.” (In the same interview, she proudly called herself “a Prada socialist.”) —>

But the strategy worked. Prop 107 won 48.2% of the vote, the first ban to fail at the ballot. Republican and right-leaning independent votes almost certainly made the difference. Even in victory, Sinema kept the LGBT community at arm’s length, as here to the Tucson Citizen. —>

Two years later, gay-marriage opponents returned with a more narrowly written amendment that would only ban same-sex unions. Sinema again chaired the Arizona Together opposition. —>

This time, without no threat to existing benefits received by straight couples, the coalition struggled to make any case against the amendment. Much of Sinema’s messaging focussed on the role of the LDS Church. (She grew up Mormon.) —>

Prop 102 passed by a healthy, 12-point margin, on the same day California passed its own Prop 8. Both were struck down as unconstitutional by federal courts a few years later. By then, Sinema was in the U.S. House. —>

What did Sinema take away from these battles? She has a well-earned faith in her ability to put together cross-partisan coalitions. And she came to believe offending your own side’s donors and activists can be a good thing. From @lgbtmap/@glaad “Best Practices” report: —>

For more on this, and its place in the broader political and legal struggle over gay marriage, check out my @Engagement_Book, which @nytimesbooks called a "lively, thorough and fascinating history." sashaissenberg.com