The Commonwealth Coalition was invited to share the Loudoun County Democratic Committee booth at Old Dominion Beer Festival last weekend – the LCDC has unanimously passed a resolution opposing the Marshall-Newman amendment and joined the statewide Coalition formed to work for its defeat – and we spent Friday and Saturday talking to festival attendees about the amendment.
The pro-amendment folks (VA 4 Marriage, I assume) also had a booth, between a punk/alt vendor and the porta-johns (Our colleagues at NoVA Town Hall provide this helpful hint: Engage people at a beer festival in conversation after they visit the johns). Their large yellow banner was very good for business, at least for us. I lost count of the people who came up to our booth after seeing our “Vote NO, Virginia!” sign to express how offended they were by seeing that “vote yes for marriage” banner.
One couple came back a second time to tell us that we should get lapel stickers, and then a third time to show us their do-it-yourself (with a little help from the henna tattoo artist) version:
The guy’s arm on the left also has a henna tattoo, but it got cut off in the picture.
The henna artist, as it turned out, initially said that she wouldn’t do words – but once our new advocates explained what it was about, she readily agreed and put our palmcards out at her booth as well.
It’s true that the Vote Yes folks did have rolls and rolls of Vote Yes stickers, just very little success in getting people to wear them. We counted very few over the two days we were there (I personally saw maybe 6 or 7).
For whatever reason, people attending a beer festival are not in the mood for amending the Constitution to restrict liberty – maybe it has something to do with that whole Prohibition thing.
These Virginians, at least, are fixin’ to Vote NO.
The real question is how many people attending a beer festival will actually vote in November?
NJH
This is true, and the task before us is to make sure that they follow through and do it. The heartening thing is that the folks who are outraged by this amendment are really outraged. They are motivated in a way that I am not seeing on the other side, which seems at best lukewarm.
Of course the amendment pushers are doing almost all of their work through right wing mega-churches, and they can count on a more or less fixed number of voters to dutifully vote as they are told, without even bothering to read the thing. But they are not passionate about it. How passionate can one be about being on the wrong side of history?
Ha! That’s my girlfriend. Sadly she’s a DC resident and cannot vote against the bill as she’d like. But I’m surely going to vote against it, and I’ve volunteered for Equality Fairfax twice to convince others as well, and donated money to Equality Virginia.
At the beer fest we also noticed some people who seemed to have come to the event with home-made temp “Vote No” tattoos, which was cool to see.