Why I Am Involved in Politics

By Jeff DeGroot

"What would happen if gay parents were allowed to raise children? I mean, I have nothing against gay people, but if they were allowed to marry they'd be able to bring up children. I'm sure these children would have a hard time growing up and having stable relationships."

I kept hearing such comments as I sat at my desk in the Oregon State Senate chambers. I was taking part in Oregon's mock legislature program, a three-day experience in which students from across the state get to write bills and try to pass them through a legislative body made up of their peers. The bills that are passed are then reviewed by members of the real Oregon State legislature and can become real laws.

I had worked on a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in the state of Oregon. A debate was now raging as my fellow students from around the state tried to convince each other to vote for or against the bill. When those opposed to my bill started to speak about how gay people couldn’t possibly raise children, I almost laughed. How could they have guessed the sponsor was me, the son of a woman and her partner who have been together for almost thirty years? As the sponsor I got to speak next.

As I stepped to the podium, I admit I was a bit nervous. I don’t usually tell people I have never met that I have same-sex parents, much less a large crowd of people. This is not because I am at all ashamed of my parents or our family (on the contrary, I’m very proud) but because I want people to get to know me for who I am before they know who my mother fell in love with.

Nevertheless, this opportunity was too good to pass up: I could show that a guy raised by two mothers could be a normal, successful teenager. So I proceeded to explain my family to the audience and tell them how I had had a wonderful childhood with two loving, female parents. I think the girl who suggested that children of gay parents wouldn’t be able to have stable relationships was a little shocked when I pointed out my girlfriend sitting in the back of the Senate chamber and said she was the co-sponsor of the bill! That brought a round of laughs, and at the conclusion of my remarks I received a standing ovation from the chamber, a memory I still cherish. The bill went on to pass the Senate and was the second bill signed by the youth governor that year.

“We all can be the proof that shows the world that LBGTQ families provide just as much love and support as any family. All of you can speak just as I did in high school about how your parents are just as normal and caring as anyone else’s. You won’t be able to change everyone’s mind, but you’ll be amazed by how much good you can do.”

I am engrossed in the world of politics. I first asked what the difference was between a Democrat and a Republican at age six, and by age eleven I was watching the Democratic National Convention on TV. My passion for politics blossomed in high school, and along with taking part in the mock legislature I led a ninety-student class taught at my high school that focused on presidential politics.

By the end of my senior year I started working on the Presidential primary campaign of Dennis Kucinich. I was drawn to his campaign because he was willing to voice his support for issues like same-sex marriage even if they weren’t popular. This meant that I knew he probably wouldn’t be elected President but I wanted to support him for standing up for what was right.

I thought my work on the campaign was done until I got a phone call about a week after the primary election. It was a woman who was asking me to run for election to be one of the delegates to the national convention. Delegates are people who come from all over the country to decide who will be the person to run for President.

I agreed to make the half-hour drive down to Eugene, where Kucinich supporters would vote on who should be the delegate to the convention in Boston. Other people who wanted to be delegates printed out flyers on why they should get the chance to go to the convention and actively lobbied the crowd. Each of us (there were six candidates) was allowed to give a short statement and then answer questions from the group. I spoke passionately about why I felt a candidate who believed in marriage equality and disagreed with the Iraq war should be a strong voice in the Democratic Party. After the group had answered everyone’s questions, the vote was taken. I won!

I became the youngest delegate from Oregon and one of the youngest nationally. (I celebrated my 19th birthday while at the convention in Boston). While this was an honor for me, it was clear evidence that more young people need to be involved in politics. When I attended a “young persons’ event,” most of the people there were between thirty-five and forty!

In Boston I became friends with the young leader of a group in Oregon called the Bus Project. Its mission is to get young people involved in political issues. I immediately became interested in the project and volunteered briefly before I headed off to Whitman for my freshman year in college.

During my freshman year at school I became active in the student government and other campus organizations. I couldn’t help noticing that many of my fellow classmates were largely apathetic about politics. Some of the most involved students I knew still didn’t seem to understand how much politicians at both the state and the national level were affecting their daily lives.

“I will always remember the night at college when I got the call from my mother who was in tears letting me know she had heard from a news report her marriage had been voided. Can you imagine any straight couple tuning into the evening news to hear their marriage was no longer recognized?”

This realization drew me back to the Bus Project the summer after my freshman year. I applied and was accepted to the Bus Project’s ten-week political program called PolitiCorps. We took classes, registered people to vote, and talked to people about the issues that affected them every day. For me the summer was like a political boot camp that challenged me in every way but taught me how to work in politics and effect change.

In PolitiCorps I met other people my age who cared about making the world a better place. I realized that if we got more young people involved we could really make a difference. When I returned to Whitman, I started a project to register my fellow students to vote. Lots of times, when people try to get young people to vote, they have a registration drive where a stranger gives them a card to register to vote. The problem with this is that it doesn’t really show people why it’s important to vote and how they can make a difference.

I thought I could come up with a better method. I decided to use Resident Assistants, who help first-year college students adjust to college life. My plan was to have Resident Assistants show students how to vote and to talk to them about how voting makes a difference on issues they care about. The Washington Secretary of State (who is in charge of voter registration in the state) liked my idea so much that we’re working to replicate it across the state!

“We are the next generation. We are the generation that can vote and volunteer for candidates who support our views. We are the generation that can educate ourselves and become leaders that run for office. We can be the generation that ends discrimination based on sexual orientation.”

I enjoyed the PolitiCorps program so much my first summer that I returned this summer to help lead the program for a new group of college students. This was an extremely rewarding experience because it allowed me to teach fellow young people how to work in politics. I spent long hours (sometimes twelve- to fourteen-hour days) helping this new group learn how best to approach and talk to young people about politics.

Because this is an election year (elections for state offices are held every two years in Oregon), I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work in some way on elections, which is why I am currently taking a semester off from Whitman and living in Portland working as the Field Director for the Bus Project. We’re called the Bus Project because we have a huge bus that we fill with young volunteers every weekend.

Lots of kids volunteer for various causes, but not very many of them volunteer for a political cause or candidate. I think this is because we young people often don’t know how to get involved, and think that politics is boring. The Bus Project proves that volunteering for a political candidate can be a good time. Our Bus Trips bring together one hundred mostly young people who get to know each other, play games, and win prizes. It is like having a summer camp on wheels, but we also do good work.

>We go to people’s houses and talk to them about candidates and issues, which helps them to see why politics is important. One of the candidates we volunteered for won by only forty votes. That’s fewer than the number of voters I might talk to in a day, so I know that our work makes a difference.

Besides electing these individual candidates, our larger goal is to put progressives in control of the Oregon State House. By “progressives” we mean candidates who support issues we call “The 6 E's”: Education, Equal Rights, the Environment, Economic Justice, Equal Rights, and “‘Ealth Care.”

Recently those candidates have been Democrats, but I support them because they care about these important issues, not because of which party they’re in. Currently Republicans control the house, meaning they have more members in the house than the Democrats, and have blocked measures to ensure adequate school funding and civil unions for same-sex couples. While most people might see state legislative races as not as important as national races, I would argue that these smaller races have a huge impact on people's lives.

Lots of people think that local politics don’t matter because the President is the person who gets to make laws, but local politicians actually make many of the rules we live by. One of the candidates we are helping is running against the Republican Speaker of the Oregon House. For those of you new to politics, the Speaker of the House basically gets to decide what bills get to be voted on by the House. This past Speaker refused to allow a bill that would legalize civil unions to even be voted on by the House, despite the fact the bill had already been passed by the Oregon Senate. If she hadn’t done this, my parents might be able to have a civil union today.

People often ask me “What drives you?” “What got you so interested in politics?” “Why are you such a nerd?” The answer, at least for the first two, is simple: my family. While taboo in some families, the subject of politics was brought up at almost every meal at my house.

I learned from an early age that elected officials made decisions that affected my family’s daily life. My mother was a nurse, and she would talk about rising health care costs and how government funding of Student Health Center at Oregon State University affected her job. I also saw her impassioned battle to make sure students were allowed access to medical care and the prescriptions they needed.

At the same time, my mother’s partner is a special education teacher at the high school I graduated from. She has been a teacher for over twenty years and has won the Golden Apple, an award given to the top teacher in the district. I’ve watched how she repeatedly goes out of her way and spends money out of her own pocket to try to enhance the lives of her students. On countless occasions she has made sure that her students, who often come from abusive or broken families, have a safe place to stay the night.

>Despite this compassion for her students, I have watched as her funding has been cut drastically over the past ten years. On top of the increased workload she has had to take on because of staff cuts, she has also had to deal with new federal education laws that don’t take into account her student’s learning disabilities.

In my parents I have also two people who have chosen careers not based on the paycheck they bring home, but the happiness they get from helping other people. This is a lesson that has been instilled in me and causes me to want to work to help people.

Besides seeing how politics affects my parents’ professional lives, I have also witnessed how the political process can have a substantial impact on our family life. As I am sure many of the people reading this can empathize with, the heated debate over gay marriage has been an emotional ordeal for our family. In 2004, my parents were able to receive a marriage license and get married, only to have their marriage voided after an Oregon Supreme Court ruling.

I will always remember the night at college when I got the call from my mother, who was in tears, letting me know she had heard from a news report her marriage had been voided. Can you imagine any straight couple tuning into the evening news to hear their marriage was no longer recognized?

While the struggle for marriage equality has been, and still will be, a straining emotional fight for me, it has taught me the lesson of how important it is to be politically active. A difference I see between myself and my peers who do not understand why someone should vote or volunteer for a candidate is that they do not connect what happens in their daily lives with what happens in Washington, D.C. It is not that any one of my friends is not affected by school funding issues or the war in Iraq, but they have not had the direct personal experience that makes them realize it does matter who is elected as their State Representative.

I only hope that the LBGTQ community as a whole understands this by mobilizing and taking action in this and all future political seasons. Go volunteer for a local State House candidate—even if it is just making some phone calls for a campaign once a week, it will make a difference. For parents, bring your children to vote. They will think that is just what everyone does, and it will become a habit for them for the rest of their lives. Also, talk to them about politics and what issues matter. I know that I would not be politically active today if it had not been instilled in me in at a young age that voting and taking action in politics matters.

For children of LBGTQ parents: it is up to us. We all can be the proof that shows the world that LBGTQ families provide just as much love and support as any family. All of you can speak just as I did in high school at my mock legislature program about how your parents are just as normal and caring as anyone else’s. When you speak, realize also that you have a tool to reach out to people who would not otherwise know about LBGTQ families. As I said before, I often get to know people before I tell them about my family. At college many of my friends didn’t know until parents’ weekend that I have two moms.

It was amazing to see people around who had been ignorant about people who were gay all of a sudden realize that two people of the same sex could raise a child who would be like any other kid. There are people who are very prejudiced against gay people, but there are many others who are only ignorant. You won’t be able to change everyone’s mind, but you’ll be amazed by how much good you can do.

We are the next generation. We are the generation that can vote and volunteer for candidates who support our views. We are the generation that can educate ourselves and become leaders that run for office. We can be the generation that ends discrimination based on sexual orientation.