California gay marriage fight goes to Chinatown

By Peter Henderson
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The path to gay marriage in California may start in Chinatown.
After a double defeat at the voting booth and in court, gay advocates are reassessing their plans to push for legal same-sex marriage in the most populous U.S. state.
The new drive, focused on getting the issue on the ballot again as soon as November 2010, is more personal and reaches farther beyond the liberal confines of San Francisco's Castro or Los Angeles' gay heartland West Hollywood.
Lost in the 2009 election wreckage for gays was the marriage campaign's relative success in Asian communities, which have swung toward support of same-sex marriage at a faster rate than the rest of California and have become a model for other groups.
Asian Americans have been building grass-roots support in Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Filipinotown for four years. Gays, lesbians and straight allies have talked about the often-taboo topic of homosexuality, set up booths at festivals, harangued non-English language media to change coverage and lobbied elected officials for support.
"What we felt we had to do is talk to people who aren't on our side. So that's why we do these crazy things like walk through the streets of Chinatown as part of the New Year's Parade. That's why we go out to festivals from Little India to Little Tokyo and talk to complete strangers," said Marshall Wong, co-chair of Asia Pacific Islander group API Equality.
From California Controller John Chiang to Star Trek's Mr. Sulu -- actor George Takei -- and dismissed U.S. Army Lieutenant Dan Choi, who said he cannot stay silent about his sexuality, Asian community heavyweights have come out in support of gay marriage.
CHANGING VIEWS OF MARRIAGE
Californians voted to ban gay marriage last November, ending same-sex nuptials a few months after the top court legalized it. The same court in May backed the new ban.
The margin of victory for the ban fell to 4 percent in 2008 from 18 percent in 2000, when a similar vote was held (and later thrown out by the court).
Together ethnic groups can dominate elections. White non-Hispanics have dropped to 43 percent of the population in California, compared with 66 percent nationwide. Asians are 12 percent of Californians, blacks 7 percent and Latinos 36 percent.
Polls of ethnic groups are often controversial because of small survey sizes. But polls of Asians by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center showed a 36 point margin of victory for the ban in 2000, falling to 6 points in 2008. The decline in support was clearly faster than in the state overall, the center said.
Arnold Pamplona, president of the Philippine American Bar Association, said his group was goaded into supporting gay marriage even though it did not seem like a Filipino issue.
"That wasn't something we were going to touch, because being Filipino American, a great majority of our members are Roman Catholic," he said.
Gay groups lobbied hard and said past discrimination against the Filipino community was similar to what gays faced, eventually closing the deal on an endorsement from the group -- and many other ethnic bar associations and alliances. Continued...
Source: Reuters