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The campaign has got bitter in recent days. The same-sex marriage advocates occasionally demonize their opponents as Christian conservatives in thrall to Pat Robertson. But Rosehill is a lapsed Protestant whose daughter is a lesbian. ("I want her to have every civil right," says Rosehill. "But same-sex marriage is not a civil right.") Rosehill says her side can win without resorting to explicitly anti-gay rhetoric, and she says she told the national Christian Coalition she wouldn't work with a local affiliate group she found "homophobic." Still, the campaign's most quoted and colorful character is strategist Michael Gabbard, who practices bhakti yoga and runs something called Stop Promoting Homosexuality International. He constantly reduces homosexuality to its bedroom component, calling it a "behavior" that society shouldn't "accept." He blames gays for the failure of his health-food store, which they picketed.
It would shock gays here to know they had such power. Ken Miller left the state several times--"trying to get away from my own sexuality"--but eventually returned to his four siblings and 12 aunts and uncles. These extended families make coming out difficult: tell one person, and a cousin in the next town will find out. Many locals stay closeted. "And that's the way a lot of the society likes it," Miller says.
Thus the upcoming vote has divided the gay community, which has been forced into a wrenching choice--not so much over whether to vote no but over what to tell family and friends about the vote, about themselves, about their lovers. Local gays sometimes resent white transplants who are so open and easy with their homosexuality. For years, the small Hawaii group paying for the lawsuit that preceded this vote was almost entirely white, many of them men and women who moved to Hawaii to escape their own closets on the mainland.
The emotionalism of the campaign is clear even in quieter settings. Before a group of Japanese-American seniors, Jackie Young of Protect Our Constitution, the group fighting the amendment, offers a reason to vote against it: "Never before have we amended our constitution here in Hawaii, a land of aloha, to specifically discriminate against one group of people. What if that group were you?" These are people who remember the internment camps, and Young--a former vice speaker of the state house of representatives and longtime activist--expects her argument to resonate. But during Q and A, a man asks her about "all those weirdos from the mainland coming here." Young sighs, objects to his choice of words and pushes on. Later, she laments, "I have never seen any discrimination in my state like this. It is so open."
--With reporting by David Jackson/Honolulu