2010 or 2012?

This post by Timothy Kincaid lays out the pros and cons of putting referenda on the ballot in California next year or in 2012. The major groups, of course, are counseling "wait." They've been counseling "wait" for over a decade now, and what has it gotten us? A president who wants to wait on gay civil rights.

Kincaid, I think, get to the core of it:

While twelvers are wondering about funding and strategy, tenners are focused on momentum, energy, honesty, and courage. Tenners want to win in 10, but find it even more important to not concede defeat. While they think victory is possible next year, they are committed to fighting this battle until it is won, even if that means going to the polls every two years.

They are exactly right. You can point back to the Black Civil Rights movement (and you'll note, they didn't wait) or to our good friends the anti-gay fundies -- they don't wait either. They keep coming back and back until they win, as they did in Arizona and as they have done across the country. If they lose an election, they go to court. If they lose in court, they go back to the electorate. The key word here is "relentless."

The national gay leadership has worked on a strategy that I think is fundamentally wrong: wait until we have the support. Maybe it's a carryover from the "it's our fault" mentality that infects so much of PC left thinking. Maybe it's just not looking at what's happening around you. We know that the leaders of the Prop 8 fight in California blew it. They lost a sure thing. We want to let them keep control? I don't think so. We can't wait until we have the support -- we have to build the support.

We keep hearing about "momentum" in this fight, about how we have to capture the momentum and not let the momentum die. That's almost right: we have to make the momentum. It's not easy. It takes time, and hard work, and a willingness to be rejected again and again, it takes voices in the media and on the blogosphere repeating the obvious until our messages starts to get through to people.

It's hard. But it's really very simple.