"Yes on Prop 8" was some of the most intelligence-insulting, manipulative, and fear-based ad campaigns of the 2008 election cycle. INSPIRED reveals that there were many in the GLBT community – including those who considered themselves activists (and many more who did not) – who had also assumed the Proposition 8 movement didn’t have a chance, especially since 2000’s Proposition 22 – an amendment to the family code defining marriage as between members of the opposite sex – had just been struck down by the California Supreme Court in May of that year. Charles Gage's documentary INSPIRED may be informative to those whose sparse knowledge of what happened between the 2008 election and 2010 court ruling came from the mainstream news. Besides excerpts from the “Yes” and “No” commercials, INSPIRED makes use of much archival footage (from news stories to digital video of varying quality, aspect ratios, and frame orientations) to depict the Los Angeles GLBT community response in the days prior to the election. It was not until after the disappointing voting results that many of the participants – the titular “inspired” – mobilized: some simply out of anger, others out of a dissatisfied response to the performance of the official “No on 8” campaign whose commercials they felt failed to connect emotionally with the audience (as well as the reticence to go off-book for fear of the opposition twisting their words, as the ads famously did with a much-replayed sound-byte from San Francisco's Mayor Gavin Newsom). Other criticisms that arose had to do with minority representation within the community (which proved to be more fractured than an outsider might assume), exacerbated by conservatives like Rachel Maddow and Bill O'Reilly shifting blame towards black voters for the proposition's passing. As the fight to repeal Proposition 8 builds, INSPIRED shows people from once-insulated communities (including Asian and Latino minorities, as well as children of gay parents) in casually "gay-friendly" areas finding their voices not only within the wider gay community - more than one interviewee associates the gay stereotype as a white male a la Harvey Milk - but within communities that encompass family, neighbors, businesses they patronize, political representatives, and so forth.

The documentary is not without problems. Some viewers may not be familiar with the event christened the "Day of Decision", and may lack a context for what the movement is building towards in the aftermath of the election (just as some passersby during the marches were haranguing the demonstrators with the fact that the election is over). Gage couches various marches within the time frame of a countdown to the "Day of Decision" (some of the earlier ones were likely mounted without the U.S. District Court ruling in mind); but then must jump back and forth in time in order to illustrate the participation of the interviewees. The climax of the film is Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional, and Gage seems to want to depict this as a triumph - for the purposes of the film's narrative - even though the interviewees sound more cautiously optimistic (the Ninth District Court of Appeal's upholding of Walker's ruling in 2012 proves in a DVD supplement gets more ecstatic reactions and the director might have considered integrating it into the feature for a new cut of the film that is more up-to-date for people first seeing the documentary after the rulings and in anticipation of further appeals and hearings).