Prop. 8 repercussions hit Sacramento theater

The blowback from last Tuesday's passage of Prop. 8, which prohibits same-sex marriage in California, has hit the California Musical Theatre, a major nonprofit stage company in Sacramento, following the revelation via the Web that its artistic director gave $1,000 to back the state constitutional amendment.

Among those weighing in with dismay over Scott Eckern's donation are Tony winners Jeff Whitty, who wrote the book for "Avenue Q," and Marc Shaiman, composer and co-lyricist of "Hairspray." Shaiman said Tuesday that he phoned Eckern on Friday to protest, then e-mailed more than 1,000 contacts to alert them about the donation.

"Of course it's his right to donate the money," said Shaiman, who was disappointed that Eckern, a California Musical Theatre employee since 1984 and its artistic director since 2003, had benefited from last season's touring production of "Hairspray," then piped money to a cause the L.A.-based Shaiman deplores. In their conversation, Shaiman said, "he basically gave me that thing we're just sick of hearing -- 'these are my religious beliefs, but it's nothing personal' " against gay people. "I don't want to hear that anymore. I just told him I'm disgusted at that use of money that came in some way from a show I created." (Update: The “Hairspray” production at California Musical Theatre last August was not a touring production, but one mounted by CMT itself. A touring version of “Hairspray” was seen at the theater in 2004.)

Whitty, whose "Avenue Q" is scheduled to play the Sacramento theater in March, was among those alerted by Shaiman's e-mail. On Monday,  he wrote in his whitless.com blog that "like Marc, I'll work to prevent CMT from producing any of my future shows with Mr. Eckern at the helm. To me, he's one of those hypocrites who profits from the contributions of gays ... but thinks of us as ultimately damned."

But today, despite wanting to "make an example of somebody," Whitty blogged that he reversed his stance on a boycott, writing that Eckern had given him a "convincing and sincere apology" and didn't deserve to be targeted for more censure. Whitty said he would "look forward to working with the California Musical Theatre in the future."

Shaiman said he would keep pushing for public acknowledgment and redress that would not damage the theater for one individual's political views but would make it clear that anti-gay views won't be accepted in the theater community. A benefit event at California Musical Theatre might be appropriate, he said, allowing backers of gay marriage an artistic platform while raising money to help mount a legal appeal to overturn Prop. 8.

In any case, Shaiman said, the response should be measured. When told that Eckern's donation had been posted on a website called antigayblacklist.com that calls for a boycott against businesses and professionals who backed Prop. 8 -- including some public school teachers -- the composer, who also writes film music, questioned using the word "blacklist," the term for the exclusion of artists in 1950s Hollywood for having suspected Communist leanings. "We have to watch ourselves and not become what we're fighting against," he said.   

Eckern released a statement today apologizing "for any harm or injury" caused by his donation. He said he would donate $1,000 -- commensurate to what he gave Prop. 8 backers -- to the Human Rights Campaign, a group that supports equal rights for gays and lesbians. Update: Eckern’s full statement is here.

After talking with many friends and colleagues, he said, "I have a better idea ... how deeply felt these issues are, and I am deeply saddened that my acting upon my religious convictions has been devastating to those I love and admire." He noted that his sister, a lesbian, is in a domestic partnership relationship.

Richard Lewis, the executive producer whose family founded California Musical Theatre decades ago, said Eckern's views were his own, not the theater's, and affirmed "appreciation ... for the [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] community who have played a crucial role in our success." A torrent of e-mails and calls protesting Eckern's donation began on Friday and has continued, said Lewis, who likened the  blowup to when Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis questioned on national television whether black ballplayers had the right stuff to be successful baseball managers.

"We're looking at the magnitude of the situation and need to discuss whether we take any action.... We don't want to rush into things and do something foolish," Lewis added. "We just put the initial statement out there: 'Don't punish the theater for what Scott chose to do.' "

The theater, which presents touring Broadway shows and produces its own summer musical festival of seven shows, hiring scores of actors and designers who commonly work in New York, has no policy against employees being politically active or making political contributions, Lewis said. He dismissed the notion that Eckern could be fired for backing Prop. 8 or that it would be allowable under California employment law.

-- Mike Boehm

Photos: Marc Shaiman, top; Jeff Whitty, with Tony Award

Photo credits: Shaiman, Al Seib / Los Angeles Times; Whitty, Jeff Christensen / Reuters

Comments

[Larry Velasco]

I feel there are some people who are thinking correctly on this subject of the theater Mr. Eckern is employeed by. He shouldn't be fired for voicing his opinion. I realize that prop. 8 is a very serious subject. One thing all of us have to realize is, we have to work together in the future as we have never been willing to do in the past. Most of us believe in God or a higher being. We at this time, more than ever need His help and guidance. It's time to put differneces aside and fight a more serious fight. I believe we are literally in a fight for our very existance. I voted for prop. 8. That is "Yes" on 8 I do however, I understand the rights of others to vote what they believe. Making statements like you can't be for prop. 8 and work in the theater is very wrong, in my opinion. I know that what ever we do we should do it with respect for the other side. Hurting people to make our point is not and has never been the way to do things.
Posted by: Concerned for our country and all of those in it. L. Velasco.

[Jeff]

I am in full agreement with the anti-gay blacklist. When you make a contribution to any political campaign you are essentially making a statement that you agree with the views of the campaign. In a civil democratic society one must stand behind the views that he or she has.

In a democracy you cannot take away civil rights from a group of individuals in private. If you are planning to do so it must be done in a public fashion that encourages debate and transparency.

Yes, everyone has a right to freedom of speech however, that freedom of speech also allows others to criticize you for what your views are and may be; this is fundamental in any democracy.

When you are making a financial contribution to take away the civil rights of your fellow citizens it must not be done in a private fashion. To have a direct outcome on a vote and then not want anyone to know that you did so is cowardly. Once again, the process must be transparent, open, and democratic; people need to realise that their public opinions have consequences and they must be prepared to stand behind these opinions, not hide under a discriminatory veil of privacy.

[Myles]

Jeff, it doesn't sound like those calling for a boycott of the theatre were willing to have a respectful debate about the issue. They wanted to hurt him for supporting what he believed in. Participating in a rational discussion of the issue means that when you are finished discussing it, you still maintain a level of respect for the individual and their right to hold an opinion. Imagine if republicans called for blacklisting people who donated to the election campaign of democrats.

You think this is different because you claim that this is a civil rights issue. It is not a civil rights issue. It is a decision by the members of a society to determine what is the recognized definition of marriage.

[Ken]

Hello? Anyone from the 'No on 8' crowd out there? My post on November 16th clearly points out a group of Californians who disproportionately voted in favor of Prop. 8.... yet you are not harkening back to the rally cry [you have deafened us all with] to identify, blacklist, and picket those who opposed you?

C'mon guys and girls! I really want to know why you are not picketing black churches across California? Why are you not labeling the 70% of black voters who voted in favor of 8 as 'Haters' ?

Again, I know the answer.... I just want a proud member of the No Crowd to step forward and answer my two simple questions!

Your actions speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
Ken

[Jay]

Ken writes: "C'mon guys and girls! I really want to know why you are not picketing black churches across California? Why are you not labeling the 70% of black voters who voted in favor of 8 as 'Haters' ?

Again, I know the answer.... I just want a proud member of the No Crowd to step forward and answer my two simple questions! "

Why don't you tell us what you think the answer is? That Blacks are violent or what?

Most people I know are not picketing black churches across California because they did not raise millions of dollars to spread lies, whereas the Mormon churches did.

[Ken]

I do appreciate your response, Jay. Thanks.

Jay Writes:
Why don't you tell us what you think the answer is? That Blacks are violent or what?

Your question about violence is NOT what I was getting at... That is a sterotype that is at worse racist, and at least, unfounded!

Yours and mine reverent attendance would be welcomed at any Christian Church in California in any city. Wanna go next Sunday?

Now that you mention it, the violence that is reported in the aftermath of all this has been perpetrated by 'no-no's' .... Nice welcome they gave to some christians who visited the Castro up in the Bagdad by the Bay! I've already mentioned the little old lady in Palm Springs....

Jay wrote:
Most people I know are not picketing black churches across California because they did not raise millions of dollars to spread lies, whereas the Mormon churches did.

What are these lies that the Mormon Church has spread? Just curious cause I don't know the specifics of the LDS stance.

Look, any donor should be on your harrassment list as should any voter who supported the proposition. Scott Eckern only donated $1000....yet he made the radar screen. So, to say only the Big donors are targeted is untrue...you still do not speak to my question about ommitting black churches and black donors.
very respectfully,
Ken

[J T]

Ken, I'm not from California and so have not seen the footage. In the abstract, I don't think anybody in their right mind condones an angry mob shoving around an elderly woman. An angry mob shoving any individual is abhorrent to me. The age and gender of the person, however, should not in and of itself excuse any and all conduct. Was the woman taunting the gays? Surely she was voting against their civil rights and implicitly if not explicitly she was telling them they were going to hell.

"Gay mob shoves old woman" is a horrible idea, and so it's clear why you're trumpeting it.

But how do you feel about "Old woman kills gay teenager"?

For all who loftily dispense their notion that this is not a civil rights issue, it is a civil rights issue and a good deal more. It floors me what this country did to black people as recently as the 1960s. Yet it was of no small comfort that black children had black mothers and other black family members and almost always a whole black neighborhood for role models, solidarity, relatability. No black child was afraid to tell his parents that he was black. It was usually the other way around. Black parents struggled with how to prepare their children to approach and deal with a world set against them. What degree of deference and respect? What degree of civil disobedience? Then, as now, there were laws and statutes and interpretations thereof which needed to be changed, while other laws needed to be obeyed. Then, as now, there was a constitution that did not explicitly disenfranchise them, but a society which was becoming less and less private and restrained in their antagonism to a disenfranchised minority, even as (and of course because) laws were beginning to change around the country, ultimately at the federal level. However, then, blacks had grown up doing virtually everything since infancy in the company of almost exclusively other blacks. Gays grow up in a sense of isolation from others like themselves, even when there may be other (closeted) gays in their community; inherently they have less experience reacting as a group to repression.

You mockingly marvel at how unruly disenfranchised gays are behaving, and as I haven't seen the footage and wasn't there, I can't say whether I defend or disown their deportment. Yet consider that a great many of these gays' parents, be they Mormon or Catholic or Protestant or Black or Hispanic, etc., never for a moment imagined that their children were gay. And because of their failure to comprehend the natural fact that some of God's children, some of their children, will be gay...or maybe because they did comprehend this and were bitter or passive-aggressive or downright unaccepting, because some of these people hid it from their parents until adulthood and because some of these people are unwelcome by their families, even thrown out and disowned, because some of them were forced into soul-killing "reparative therapies," their children not only grow up into a society which has established structures to give everybody BUT them even more responsibility and maturity in the tradition of marriage, they are a bit unruly when the oppression they have lived with all their lives becomes such a public thing as to be not only voted for but paid for by a majority of their friends and neighbors. Tens of millions of dollars at this time of all times in our country's economic history. Tens of millions of votes at this time of all times in our country's transcendence of its prejudices.

Because of that lack of societal support in childhood, in adolescence, from parents, from schools, from religious institutions, from government, from non-government organizations; because of that small and maligned and mocked segment of visible gay people; because they do not have the comforting and nurturing institution of marriage to look forward to and mature toward; indeed, because of the fact that people like the artistic director of a local musical theater group and little old ladies alike are spending money and casting votes to limit their lives, to squelch their souls, to dash their dreams; because they have no nuclear support group to turn to; and because they get the message they are literally damned if they do and damned if they don't, a disproportionately larger number of gay youth tragically choose to literally take their own lives rather than perceive those lives metaphorically being taken by these others.

Was that little old lady holding up her cross to express to gays that she related to their stigma, that she carried a heavy burden through life as well, that she was intimately familiar with the story of an oppressed minority who were abused by secular laws and popular religions alike? Was she holding up her cross to express to gays that Jesus died to absolve them of their sins and deliver them from a superstitious and hateful legacy of condemnation to a world of freedom? Was she holding up her cross to express to gays Christ's spirit of forgiveness, inclusion and nonjudgmentalism? Was she holding up her cross to say "I will not cast a stone"? Was she holding up her cross to express to gays that Jesus said he was there to tell everyone that God's greatest commandment was love? If so then I am discouraged by those gays for their coarse reactionary intolerance and disrespect, but I know God will forgive them for getting it all wrong.

Or was that little old lady holding up her cross to express to gays that though the church no longer condemns those who live together before marriage, or who divorce and remarry, it still teaches that homosexuality is a sin? Was she holding up her cross to express to gays that though the church has relaxed, forgotten about, or completely reversed themselves on issues such as working on the Sabbath and eating shellfish and holding slaves and the "mixing" of Catholics and Protestants and other races and a thousand other things the Bible condemns and/or church people perceived the Bible as condemning and were intolerant of, she drew the line at this issue? Was she holding up her cross to express to gays that she believed they were going to hell if they married another person of the same gender instead of some poor unsuspecting person of the opposite gender? Was she holding up her cross to express to gays that she feels it's more healthy and spiritually authentic for them to live a lie and go without a spouse's love than to try to live up to good principles as God made them? Was she holding up her cross to express to gays that she feels that it absolves her of any responsibility for what she does with her money and her vote, that she needn't search her head and her heart and her soul and understand the issue as long as she is on the side of a long-standing tradition? Was she holding up that cross as they do in movies to vampires, as if the gays were evil monsters whose motives are unconscionably destructive? Was she holding up her cross to say "this entitles me to cast a stone—this IS a stone I cast at you"? If so then I am discouraged by her for her coarse reactionary intolerance and disrespect, but I know God will forgive her for getting it all wrong.

Why do gays not picket the black churches? I can see two reasons on the face of it. One, there is an ugly history in this country of mob actions against blacks. Historically, rallies against black churches have had a dress code, and gays don't own pointy white hats.

Two, gays are happy that the black community has a president to claim as their own in Barack Obama. Though it's still too politically radioactive for him to have come out for gay marriage (and indeed perhaps he deeply disagrees with it), Obama had a far more progressively pro-gay stance during the election than the Mormon candidate, Mitt Romney, who flip-flopped on his support of Massachusetts laws on the issue. Again, the government and societal mistreatment of blacks is still so fresh in this country's history, still so recently healed, that in the long list of groups who are oppressing gays, from the standpoint of conscience and compassion, blacks are not at the top of the list of hypocrites and haters to be organized against. While Mormons no doubt are on the receiving end of some negative attitudes, the public consciousness views Mormons as privileged, wealthy, fair of skin and hair but not of mindedness, who benefit from laws and statutes and epitomize the establishment and would otherwise have everything going for them, even if they belong to what is perceived as something of a cult. When they want more leeway to go outside the public mores, they seem free to build town-sized compounds, hole off from the world, and live as if in their own country. They are, as a group, in the public consciousness, a fairer target when they go around manipulating sties in others' eyes.

Blacks are clearly acting against their own best interests and the best interests of the community at large. Studies show that more blacks than whites are on the "down low," living outwardly hetero lives but secretly "creeping" into sexual situations with other men. As a result, more black women than white have gotten AIDS through heterosexual transmission. Their intransigence and their denial is a matter of life and death, and they need to come to grips with this not for a bunch of white gay protesters but for their own sake. It is a sad fact of this country's history that each group that finally claws its way into the mainstream of American society is loathe to be seen as condoning the inclusion of the next group of outsiders. I blame the society, not these groups themselves.

But, if it makes you feel any better, I would imagine that that tiny group of visible gays you're discussing, and the "silent majority" of gays elsewhere in society, will not be supporting any black churches or black businesses who have gone out of their way to be anti-gay. Yet, because of the ghettoization of our polarizing society, those black churches and businesses are probably out of the way of most gays anyway.

JT- I do appreciate your thoughtful and heartfelt response to my posts... I do appreciate your honesty. So, thankyou.

You and I are in agreement that violence and property damage perpetrated on innocent people is always wrong. The visual images of (no on 8 folks) ruffing up a little old lady or hurling hatefilled explicatives at envangelical christians walking through the Castro serves only to hurt the cause. The editing may be argued as 'unfair'...but, right-wrong or indifferent, in some cases: Good deeds go unnoticed and bad deeds are never forgotten.

The 'no crowd' is exercising their right of "Selective Indignation" and "Political Correctness" regarding targets for protests and boycotts. The court of public opinion would frown on overt harrasment of black christian churches and black donors.

The proponents of same sex marriage have been marketing the cause as being similar to if not the same as the struggle for civil rights by black americans... That is a shameful comparisson in my opinion. There has never been a wholesale design by individuals or Government to descriminate against homosexuals in this country. The comparisson is inaccurate and it cheapens the memory of all those who suffered and died while struggling to end oppression. It is just not the same.

It is interesting to me to read/hear the argument for 'saving marriage'...I don't believe legislation can save anything...let alone a marriage. It is ironic that an argument (compelling and truthful) is put forward that marriages fail half the time, adultery occurs at epidemic rates and many people have been married multiple times....So knowing all of this, why would anyone want to participate in an institution that is admittedly a complete fraud and failure in 50% of the cases? [ it is because a majority said 'no']

Sir Elton John has publicly stated that he is not 'for' gay marriage. He contends that he and his partner are perfectly happy in a civil union, adding, "let straight people have marriage". Is he wrong in someway?

I did not cast my vote for prop 8 with any malice, hate, discrimination or bigotry. The question was set before me: "Should marriage be defined as being between one man and one woman?" I voted "yes". I simply voted.

Very respectfully,

Ken

[Jim]

I just love how religious people think they can impose there religion by changing the constitution and think that somehow they won't be affected by there choice.

The creators of the Constitution new full well the nature of religions desire for absolute power over individuals lives.

Hence separation of church and state, so next time don't assume you know better then those who wrote the constitution.

End of Story, equality is not up to a Mob ruling.

[Jim]

Don't worry we will do all we can to punish your theater, some nerve a theatre group to do something like this.

[Pantarkes]

You know, folks.... the whole opposite sex pairing thing made SENSE - when the planet was young and largely unoccupied and there was LOTS of space and room and land begging to be conquered and occupied and filled up. Forests to be ravaged and mown down, lakes to be drained, seas to be overfished, ETC, ETC ETC.
Those times are gone.

There is no longer any viable "reason" (if indeed there ever really WAS) to "go forth and multiply. In fact I would be so bold as to say that it's specifically contraindicated.

So while your charming and rather quaint notion of "appropriate" union is, well - just that - charming (if antiquated and largely divorced from rationality and prudence, not to mention REALITY), it most assuredly does NOT "fly".

In fact, the time for continued breeding as a manifest "right" has long passed - you are now endangering the planet AND society with your self centered, heterosexist agenda.

[Kevin]

Ahhh... Since we are in the mood to take rights away... Rosa... you are a woman, who sounds uneducated.... we should take your rights away! You also sound like you might not be from this country, so there goes your greencard.... You make me sick!