(E)vidence of entrenched homophobia and religious intolerance obscure a more difficult truth. Prop 8 should have been defeated — two months before the election, it was down 17 points in the polls — but the gay-rights groups that tried to stop it ran a lousy campaign. According to veteran political observers, the No on Prop 8 effort was slow to raise money, ran weak and confusing ads, and failed to put together a grass-roots operation to get out the vote.

‘This was political malpractice,’ says a Democratic consultant who operates at the highest level of California politics. ‘They fucked this up, and it was painful to watch. They shouldn’t be allowed to pawn this off on the Mormons or anyone else. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and now hundreds of thousands of gay couples are going to pay the price.’

‘I wanted to make sure I never lived like that again,’ says (Katherine) McIntosh, who turns 77 on Saturday. ‘We all worked hard and we all had good jobs and we all stayed with it. When we got a home, we stayed with it.’

McIntosh is the girl to the left of her mother when you look at the photograph. The picture is best known as ‘Migrant Mother,’ a black-and-white photo taken in February or March 1936 by Dorothea Lange of Florence Owens Thompson, then 32, and her children.

Lange was traveling through Nipomo, California, taking photographs of migrant farm workers for the Resettlement Administration. At the time, Thompson had seven children who worked with her in the fields.

‘She asked my mother if she could take her picture — that … her name would never be published, but it was to help the people in the plight that we were all in, the hard times,’ McIntosh says.

‘So mother let her take the picture, because she thought it would help.’”