Prop 6, and Anita Bryant???
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California Proposition 6 or Proposition 6, more commonly known as The Briggs Initiative, was an initiative on the California State ballot in November of 1978. Sponsored by John Briggs, a conservative state legislator from Orange County, the failed initiative would have banned gays and lesbians from working in California's public schools and came on the heels of a conservative campaign in Dade County, Florida organized by a coalition named Save Our Children, publicly headed by Anita Bryant that repealed one of the first gay rights ordinances in the U.S..
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Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briggs_InitiativeI remember protesting that, WAY.... back in the day, LOL!
Cripes... Even Reagan had it right back then...
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Campaigns for and against the Initiative
Hurting from recent losses, the gay and lesbian community got organized. A huge coalition of predominantly progressive grassroots activists, led by out gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, teacher (later Supervisor of SF Board of Supervisors) Tom Ammiano, activist Hank Wilson, and many others, under the slogan "come out! come out! wherever you are!", mobilized to defeat the Initiative. In what became the "No on 6" campaign, gay men and lesbians went door to door in their cities and towns across the state to talk about the harm the initiative would cause.
Gay men and lesbians came out to their families and their neighbors and their co-workers, spoke in their churches and community centers, sent letters to their local editors, and otherwise revealed to the general population that gay people really were "everywhere" and included people they already knew and cared about. For a time the ballot measure was ahead in public-opinion polls, with about 61% of voters supporting it while 31% opposed it – a week before the election. The movement against it succeeded little in shifting public opinion, even though major organizations and ecclesiastical groups opposed it.
The former-governor Ronald Reagan issued an informal letter of opposition to the initiative, answered reporter's questions about the initiative by saying he was against, and, a week before the election, wrote an editorial in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner opposing it . <1> The anticipated landslide for the initiative became a landslide against the initiative, losing even in Orange County, in the largest shift of public opinion ever recorded within such a short time frame.
Some gay Republicans also became organized against the initiative on a grassroots level. The most prominent of these, the Log Cabin Republicans, was founded in 1977 in California, as a rallying point for Republicans opposed to the Briggs Initiative. The Log Cabin Club lobbied Republican officials to oppose the measure, and shortly before the election, after the polls had changed in the opponents' favor due to the mobilization of thousands of activists across the political spectrum, even former Governor Ronald Reagan, later President, was finally moved to publicly oppose the measure. The Initiative was defeated by more than one million votes.
Reagan opposed the ballot initiative sponsored by religious conservatives that would have barred homosexuals from teaching in the public schools. The timing is significant because he was then preparing to run for president, a race in which he would need the support of conservatives and moderates very uncomfortable with homosexual teachers. As Lou Cannon (Reagan biographer) puts it, Reagan was “well aware that there were those who wanted him to duck the issue” but nevertheless “chose to state his convictions.” Reagan's opposition was on record as extensive excerpts from his informal statement that were reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle of September 24, 1978. Reagan's November 1st editorial stated, in part, “Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this.” <1>
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Same link.
:shrug:
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