Shouting, “We will win; love is not a sin!” and carrying recently antiquated “No on 8″ signs, students against Proposition 8 came together Friday night and held a march around campus and a rally in Bruin Plaza.
The protest, which was mostly peaceful and comprised mostly of UCLA students, was organized in response to the recent passage of Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between only a man and a woman in California.
The march, which took a few hundred protestors around campus and up onto the Hill, ran into no opposition along the way.
The organizers of the rally, Mikael Miller, a second-year linguistics student and Stephen Searles, a second-year political science student, felt the rally was necessary to keep the “No on 8″ message resonating around campus.
“The obvious effect of a protest is visibility for the issue,” Searles said. “We are hoping to establish a movement that can accomplish something.”
Miller works at the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Campus Resource Center. Searles worked on the West Los Angeles division of the “No on 8″ campaign and is currently on the board of directors for the LGBT Resource Center. They said they are looking past their election losses and focusing on what can be done in the future.
“A big goal of tonight is to get people to become involved and become active,” Miller said. “Students and student activists have been an integral part of successful political campaigns in the past.”
As part of the effort to bring students on campus into the loop, Miller and Searles created an organization called The Action Network for Civil Rights, a group which is aimed at promoting civil rights and equality to all, not just those who identify as LGBT.
“In light of the election results, we found a lack of student mobilization,” Miller said. “We also noticed that in California, there are few groups aimed on the broader concept of civil rights, just groups that focus on specific demographics. What we want to do is get students out there and get them active.”
Students like fourth-year linguistics and psychology student Rachel Duran said they came out to participate because they thought it was the right thing to do.
“I think that there is a fear of gays and lesbians in our society,” Duran said. “I think it is important to come and say something, especially after gays and lesbians were essentially told that their way of life is not acceptable.”
Following the march, students listened to a short speech by Miller and Searles. Both thanked participants for their time and laid out their hopes for the future.
“I feel even more motivated to keep going,” said third-year biochemistry and biomedical engineering student Mia Balangue. “It’s good getting the word out and being out there up on the Hill.”
Both Miller and Searles said they were encouraged by the success of the rally, as well as the student activism against Proposition 8.
Miller said people need to take the issue into their own hands and make a clear statement against what proponents of the ban have called the traditional definition of marriage.
“If students don’t get out there, their voice won’t be heard,” Miller said. “If you don’t make the change, it won’t happen.”
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