Fight Like a Mother
Page 15
However, in other areas, we’ve been more flexible. Right from the beginning, our volunteers wanted to wear their Moms Demand Action shirts everywhere—not just to gun violence prevention–related events, but to concerts, plays, their kids’ sports games, and even when they volunteered for other causes. At first we were concerned about our brand being associated with anything and everything that our volunteers were interested in, but then we realized the amazing value of having tens of thousands of brand ambassadors keeping our name and cause in the public eye.
We’ve seen our volunteers wearing Moms Demand Action shirts at vigils and memorials; while working at food banks in Ferguson, Missouri; and in Houston while cleaning up in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. My personal favorite was the man from Austin, Texas, who wore a Moms Demand Action shirt when he was interviewed on the local TV news after he adopted a thirty-five-pound orange tabby cat named Symba from a local animal shelter.
Over the years, our volunteers have worked within our style bible (and sometimes pushed it to the limit) to put their own flair on Moms Demand Action buttons and T-shirts. Some people in the political world call this “rogue chum”: chum refers to traditional campaign giveaway items such as T-shirts, lawn signs, and bumper stickers; rogue means the supporters are so passionate that they’ve started making the chum themselves.
First, Texas volunteers started to bling their buttons. If you’ve ever been to a homecoming event in Texas, you’ve seen the supersized, bedazzled mum corsages the girls wear to the game. Texas volunteers basically did that to their pins. When volunteers in other states started seeing photos of Texas volunteers wearing Moms Demand Action pins the size of pumpkins covered in ribbons and rhinestones, the horse was out of the barn.
Volunteers in other states started adding location-specific details to their Moms Demand Action chum: for instance, California’s pin features a bear, to reflect the bear on the state’s flag but also to symbolize our synergies with that state’s abundance of mama bears. Other pins feature crabs or cowboy boots or corn.
And volunteers are customizing more than pins. The variations of Moms Demand Action fashion are endless. Volunteers have cropped their T-shirts, turned them into dresses, and worn them Flashdance-style with the necks torn out. I’ve seen handmade shirts that demand action on behalf of kids, grandparents, and even dogs. Some volunteers have decked out their fingernails with logos for Moms Demand Action or our Gun Sense Voter check mark. In upstate New York, volunteers had aprons made with stats about gun violence printed on them. And at some events, our volunteers even wear capes with our logo on the back.
Perhaps the most impressive way volunteers have personalized elements of our brand is to have them tattooed on their skin, whether it’s the Moms Demand Action logo or our “One Tough Mother” tagline. We started off by making fake tattoos, but many, many moms have made them permanent.
I admit that, at first, my inner PR executive struggled with these variations on our carefully constructed branding elements. But it didn’t take me long to realize that there really is no greater honor than for a volunteer to want to merge a piece of herself—whether it’s her love of bedazzling or her actual flesh—with Moms Demand Action. We are only as successful as our volunteers are passionate, and all our rogue chum shows me that we aren’t an army of anonymous volunteers; we’re living, breathing, multifaceted women (and others), and no matter how big our pins are or what shape our shirts are, the better you can see us as both individuals and a united force, the more our presence will move you.
A Brand Makes You a Beacon
One of the most important things a dynamic brand does for you is make you more visible, and then you can draw more attention to your cause. And attention certainly comes in handy—as evidenced by Kristi’s story of the packed room of red shirts swaying the vote at the Tennessee statehouse. Even when the stakes aren’t so high, having a visible brand does some heavy lifting for you. As an Arkansas volunteer said, “When I’ve worn my Moms Demand Action shirt around town, I’ve even recruited new volunteers while standing in the grocery line!”
We also stand out at rallies and parades thanks to volunteers carrying huge, Styrofoam letters that spell out the word MOMS. A Missouri volunteer with a background in theater design first made the huge letters to use in the Women’s March in St. Louis just after the 2016 election. “I just knew the Women’s March would be big,” she said, “and with my background in theater I knew we’d need something splashy to stand out. Which we did—the photographers LOVED it.” Now volunteers in almost every state have their own set of these letters with their own personalization for their state (usually inside the O of Moms).
But in some cases, becoming more visible can also make you the target of negative reactions. One Dallas volunteer wrote on Twitter, “Wore my Moms Demand Action shirt to the bank today. Got called a ‘fucking cunt libtard.’ I’ll wear that badge with pride.” A Las Vegas volunteer who was wearing her shirt on the way to a monthly Moms Demand Action meeting stopped by a grocery store to pick up snacks. After a man stopped her in the parking lot to insult and threaten her, she tweeted this: “To the angry man at the grocery store who just called me a f**king fat c*nt and said if he had a gun right now he’d shoot me, and that I shouldn’t walk to my car alone . . . you didn’t break me! I’m at my @MomsDemand meeting right now and you can bet your ass we will #KeepGoing!”
Our shirts can even cause controversy when we show up in statehouses. For example, a Florida House sergeant of arms told our volunteers they couldn’t wear their Moms Demand Action shirts during a gun bill hearing and that they’d have to take them off or turn them inside out. After sitting in the hearing with their shirts on inside out for a while, one of our volunteers marched up to the sergeant of arms office and demanded to be shown where it was written that our shirts weren’t allowed. There was no policy to be found, and the media declared a victory for Moms Demand Action volunteers.
The good news is that for all the negative attention they can attract, our red shirts can also help you see how many allies you have in the immediate vicinity with just one glance. As one Tallahassee volunteer put it, “When I see other people wearing our shirts around town, I am deliriously happy and feel like we are united as superheroes.” Another volunteer said: “When we go to rallies and we have children in strollers, we’re often surrounded by men who are open carrying AR-15s, semiautomatic rifles, or Glocks. That can be terrifying. By having women show up en masse in their T-shirts, we both feel safer and look stronger as a sea of red.”
As a result of our volunteers’ passion and their seeming omnipresence, we’re recognized everywhere we go. During the 2016 elections, politicians would look for the block of red-shirted Moms Demand Action volunteers in the audience and give us a shout-out. At one point, Bill Clinton tapped Hillary on the shoulder and, while pointing at us, said, “There are your moms!” I couldn’t believe that something I started in my kitchen was being recognized by a past and (I had hoped) future president.
Being more visible promotes more than just your cause, of course: it also gives you, personally, a chance to be seen and reckoned with in a way that you may not even know you’ve been missing. It’s a common—if often unspoken—complaint of motherhood that it can make you feel invisible. In many ways, your identity as an individual can slip away when you become a mom, whether that occurs on the surface—what mom hasn’t let go of at least some of her previous interests and hobbies after having kids?—or on a deeper level—so many of us have also felt our sense of self undergo a wobble if not a major shift after the transition to motherhood. But we moms wield most of the unseen power in this country. It is absolutely right that we display that power visually, too. And when you put on the red shirt, you’re impossible to ignore.
Our shirts make us recognizable to each other, too. From signs in windows to stickers on cars to our T-shirts and tattoos, when you belong to one of the largest grassroots movements in the country, you have friends everywhere.
And that’s the final piece of what a savvy brand can do for you—lend you longevity. Because, goodness knows, the need for advocacy work isn’t going to end any time soon. Any tool that helps you gather influence and build momentum is simply too vital to overlook.
8
Know Your Numbers
It’s obvious that a huge piece of the Moms Demand Action effectiveness is due to the dedication of our volunteers. We make calls and send emails and knock on doors. We show up at meetings and hearings. We stay as long as we need to stay. And we keep doing it for as long as it takes to ultimately score a win. Yet, as powerful as our presence and our voices are to effect change, there’s another crucial piece of the activism puzzle that has a power all its own: data.
Our three-year fight to pass a law that disarms domestic abusers in Rhode Island is a perfect example of how having trustworthy data can tip the scales in what might otherwise feel like an unwinnable fight.
According to federal law, domestic abusers subject to final restraining orders are prohibited from possessing guns, and whether they are required to surrender guns they already own is up to a judge’s discretion. Under Rhode Island law, they were not necessarily prohibited from possessing guns. Nor were they always required to surrender their guns once they were convicted. Rhode Island state representative Teresa Tanzi had worked as an advocate at a domestic abuse resource center and knew that this discrepancy between federal law and state law was costing Rhode Island women their lives. So in 2014 she introduced a bill to resolve it. The Rhode Island Moms Demand Action chapter leader, Jennifer Boylan, pledged to help.
Teresa and Jennifer assumed that the bill would be well received: a lawmaker would introduce it, other lawmakers would agree that the bill was a good idea, it would come to a vote, and it would pass. Easy.
“Looking back now,” Jennifer says, “I had a very Schoolhouse Rock–inspired impression of how things would go. I thought it was a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want to make sure that domestic abusers didn’t get to buy guns or keep the ones they already had?”
Little did she know that she, Teresa, and the Rhode Island volunteers were in for a three-year battle that would include harassment from gun extremists, thousands of hours of activism, and lots of losing forward.
That first year, the 2013–2014 legislative session, the bill failed to advance out of committee. Despite the testimony of domestic abuse survivors and plenty of calls to lawmakers from Moms Demand Action volunteers, Teresa recalls the House and committee leadership—all of them men—saying to her: “Teresa, you just don’t understand. These women are only trying to game the system and get a leg up in their divorce. Judges give restraining orders out like candy. There’s no real danger here. We can’t take people’s guns away.” This is a classic example of mansplaining for you—telling a woman, who has direct experience with a problem, that there is nothing to worry her pretty little head about. When in reality, making a false claim would expose these vulnerable women to potential felony perjury charges that carry a potential jail time of up to twenty years! These men in power were demonstrating that they did not believe women or hear their cries for help, belying a fundamental and institutional distrust of women, which only drove Teresa and Jennifer to keep going.
In the 2014–2015 legislative session these two leaders upped their game and got more survivors to testify by working in coalition with Sisters Overcoming Abusive Relationships and the Rhode Island Commission Against Domestic Violence, two local organizations dedicated to supporting victims of domestic violence.
They also decided to gather some key data to help cut through the anecdotes and objectively show the scope of the problem. Teresa and Jennifer reached out to researchers at Everytown for Gun Safety, who pored over nearly twenty-two hundred court documents to analyze every case that had resulted in a restraining order in the previous two years. They found that in the 1,609 cases where Rhode Islanders were subjected to domestic violence protective orders, judges required that they surrender their guns in only about 5 percent of them—even when the person requesting the restraining order mentioned that their alleged abuser had a firearm and/or had threatened to shoot them. Everytown researchers wrote up their findings in a report that they shared with the Providence Journal, which, in June 2015, published a preview of those findings on the front page with the headline “In R.I. Domestic Violence Cases, Suspects Often Keep Guns.”1
That article raised awareness of the issue and provided an important counterweight to the anecdotal narrative that women sought restraining orders just to give themselves more leverage in a divorce battle. “The report and its media coverage gave me and the Moms Demand Action volunteers something we could walk up to a legislator with and say, ‘This is the reality in Rhode Island; we have to do something about this,’” Teresa recalls.
As important and eye-opening as the report was, it didn’t change the fate of the bill—yet. The 2015 bill also never made it to a floor vote, because the way things work in the Rhode Island House is that nothing is brought for a vote without the approval of the speaker of the House. During this period, the speaker was Nicholas Mattiello, an A-rated NRA Democrat (in this case, getting an A is not a good thing) who was staunchly opposed to the bill. Teresa did everything she could to get Mattiello to bring the bill to a vote, including camping outside his office for hours despite being told by his staff that he wasn’t available, but he was not swayed. Luckily, neither were Teresa and Jennifer.
In the winter of 2016, Jennifer heard an interview with Speaker Mattiello on the radio. In this radio appearance, the interviewer put the speaker on the spot and asked his opinion of the movement to disarm domestic abusers. Mattiello said the bill should be moved forward to a vote. Jennifer saw this admission as an opportunity to hold the speaker accountable for what he’d said. It wasn’t enough for him to suggest support of popular legislation that polled well with women; he needed to act. So Jennifer decided to up the pressure.
First, she started organizing weekly lobby days at the statehouse, where Moms Demand Action volunteers showed up in their red T-shirts to meet with lawmakers and generally make their presence known. Soon the Rhode Island team had forged new bonds with supportive legislators, especially woman lawmakers in the House and Senate who badly wanted to pass the bill. They were building a coalition of like-minded legislators; the problem was swaying those who were opposed to the idea. And that’s where Everytown’s report came in, again.
During the 2015–2016 legislative session, Teresa recalls that she requested so many copies of the report that the Everytown staff ran out and volunteers had to make several last-minute trips to the copy shop before each hearing. “I needed the legislators to have the facts in front of them so that they couldn’t say they weren’t aware of the problem, so I brought them to every hearing and gave them to everyone in attendance, including those in the audience and the elected officials.”
Together, the increased presence at the statehouse and the Everytown report began to tip the scales, although not as quickly as you might expect.
It took almost a year to sway Mattiello to introduce the bill for a vote on the floor of the House in the spring of 2016. After a lengthy debate that kept Moms Demand Action volunteers at the statehouse late into the night—Teresa herself responded to a grilling from committee members for an hour and a half, a state record—the House passed the bill. It seemed like our Rhode Island volunteers would finally score a win! But when the bill moved to the Senate, a budget disagreement abruptly ended
the session before the bill could come to a vote. The bill was in limbo until a special session reconvened.
Finally, in September 2017, after three years of losing forward, both houses of the Rhode Island legislature passed the Protect Rhode Island Families Act. A few weeks later, the Moms Demand Action volunteers who’d advocated for the bill stood with Teresa and watched as a woman and fellow mom, Governor Gina Raimondo, signed the bill into law.
“The Protect Rhode Island Families Act would not have passed without the efforts of the Moms Demand Action volunteers—that’s a fact,” Raimondo says. “The legislative leadership had no appetite to pass this bill until Moms volunteers showed up and protested and testified and made themselves impossible to ignore. They changed the conversation.”
Governor Raimondo’s support for the bill also played a big role in its ultimate passage; it was a unique opportunity to be able to partner with the governor during the process. Having her support inspired even more women to get involved, particularly when it came time to testify at various hearings. “Testifying for or against a bill can take hours; you have to put your name on a list, and you might be number 110,” Raimondo explains. On the days when this bill would be heard, she made the governor’s suite at the statehouse available to women bringing children—she had a large closet painted and converted into a very comfortable nursing station. She also arranged for snacks and babysitters. “We wanted women to know that we want you here, we need you here, and the process will be better if you’re here,” Raimondo recalls. It’s a strategy that paid off: “The fact that so many women had the courage to tell their stories was unbelievably powerful. I could tell it made a difference in the lawmakers’ minds.” (Which is just one more reason why we need more women in office—to make the legislative process more welcoming to other women.)