# Save Our Children Campaign (1977) A 1977 Florida ballot-measure campaign organized by singer and orange-juice spokesperson **[[Anita Bryant]]** that succeeded in **repealing Dade County's January 1977 gay-rights ordinance** in a **June 7, 1977 referendum** (69% to 31% margin). The campaign is generally cited as the **founding event of the modern American Religious Right's anti-LGBTQ political organizing** and the model that subsequent anti-LGBTQ ballot-measure campaigns operated from for the next four decades. ## What the Ordinance Did The **Dade County (Miami area) Metropolitan Commission** had passed an ordinance on **January 18, 1977** prohibiting employment, housing, and public-accommodation discrimination on the basis of "affectional or sexual preference." The ordinance — one of the earliest U.S. local gay-rights laws — passed 5-3 over substantial public opposition from local evangelical organizations and the conservative Catholic archdiocese. ## The Bryant Campaign Bryant — a former Miss Oklahoma, Miss America runner-up, and the longtime advertising spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission — emerged as the public face of the repeal effort within weeks of the ordinance's passage. Her organization, **"Save Our Children, Inc."**, framed the gay-rights ordinance as a threat to children specifically — adopting what would become the durable trope of **anti-LGBTQ-rights-as-child-protection** that runs through the contemporary "groomer" rhetoric of the 2020s. The campaign: - **Raised more than $200,000** in the spring 1977 referendum campaign (a substantial sum for a local election at the time) - **Mobilized evangelical and Catholic congregations** through coordinated pulpit campaigning - **Featured paid advertisements** quoting Bryant: *"Some of the stories I could tell you of child recruitment and child abuse by homosexuals would turn your stomach"* - **Won the June 7, 1977 referendum** with 69% support for repeal ## Movement Consequences The Save Our Children victory had immediate and long-term consequences for the broader American LGBTQ-rights and Religious-Right movements: **For the Religious Right** — The campaign demonstrated that **anti-LGBTQ ballot organizing was a viable political-mobilization tool** that could activate evangelical and Catholic voters across denominational lines. Within five years, similar campaigns were running in Wichita, St. Paul, Eugene, and other cities. The 1992 [[Colorado Amendment 2]] and the 2008 California Proposition 8 are direct descendants of the Save Our Children model. **For the LGBTQ movement** — The campaign provoked a wave of organized response, including: - **The 1977 boycott of Florida orange juice** (Bryant's commercial product) — one of the first major American consumer-boycott actions organized around an LGBTQ-rights issue - **The November 1978 defeat of California Proposition 6** (the Briggs Initiative), led in part by [[Harvey Milk]] — explicitly framed by organizers as the line-in-the-sand response to the Bryant campaign's national momentum - **The October 1979 [[First National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights]]** — the founding national mass-mobilization event of the post-Stonewall American LGBTQ-rights movement, organized in significant part as a response to the Bryant-campaign era's demonstration of the need for national-level organizing ## Place in the Vault The Save Our Children Campaign is the **founding event of the modern American Religious Right's anti-LGBTQ political organizing tradition** — and the model that contemporary anti-LGBTQ political organizing (including the 2022-onward state-legislative wave) continues to operate from. Its 1977 success demonstrated that anti-LGBTQ rhetoric framed around child-protection language could mobilize majoritarian voter coalitions across religious denominations, a discovery that has structured American culture-war politics ever since. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Anita Bryant]] - [[Christian Right Timeline]]