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Foto: Fritz Liess

More than 75 activists gathered to plan for a struggle to repeal Proposition 8 and take a step forward for to achieve equal rights in California.

The “Working Together for Equality” event brought together on August 29 organizations like Yes on Equality!, chapters of Marriage Equality USA (MEUSA), Love Honor Cherish (LHC), GSAFE: Gay-Straight Alliance for Equality, San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (SAME), One Struggle One Fight (OSOF), various Democratic Clubs from throughout California, Equality Network, International Socialist Organization (ISO), RENWL, and the Courage Campaign, as well as representatives of various religious communities and unaffiliated people who have been organizing around LGBT issues.

Several groups of activists submitted plans for how a signature-gathering campaign should be organized. The “Davis Plan”, organized around 10 geographical regions, was selected.

According to the Socialist Worker, Keynote speaker Ace Smith, a veteran campaign strategist and leader of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign in California, Texas and North Carolina underlined that the push to reinstate equal marriage is a civil rights movement.

“This is a civil rights movement. You can’t script it. You have to let people go. They have to be able to organize freely. Capturing lightning in a bottle–it either happens or it doesn’t. You have to let it happen. It’s what you’re seeking to achieve, but you don’t do it by planning a typical campaign…You can’t be thinking about how to tweak this message and this sentence. You have to understand you’re going to make some people uncomfortable.”

The meeting was one of the most collaborative and democratic of the campaign so far and a big step towards the necessary coordination of forces.

Read Socialist Worker‘s report here.