Mercury News
November 4, 2004
Terrorism, the war in Iraq and the economy were supposed to be the three big issues of the 2004 election.
But gay marriages in San Francisco and Massachusetts -- and the intense backlash they created among conservative voters -- played a huge role in mobilizing evangelical Christians to the polls, particularly in the battleground state of Ohio.
Voters in 11 states across the country, from Arkansas to Kentucky to North Dakota, adopted constitutional bans on same-sex marriage Tuesday, in many cases by a 3-1 ratio. Even in Michigan and Oregon -- states won by Sen. John Kerry -- the bans passed handily.
``Five judges in Massachusetts and the mayor of San Francisco may have done more to help George W. Bush's campaign then anything else,'' said Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, which has 30 million members. ``Evangelicals turned out as much to vote for these amendments as they did to vote for President Bush. It got them to the polls.''
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has said Bush's call in January for a federal anti-gay-marriage amendment motivated his decision to open City Hall to same-sex nuptials, took the offensive Wednesday when he was asked whether he had second thoughts about his timing.
``I find it pretty repugnant in a day and age where we are all students of history that people would question, based upon strong beliefs, someone or somebody that at least stands up,'' he said.
The 37-year-old Democrat then suggested that if political observers wanted a scapegoat for Bush's win, they would be better off looking to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who campaigned for the president in Ohio last week, or Osama bin Laden's latest taped missive to the American people.
Gay marriage alone was not the deciding factor, some political analysts said, but conservatives seized on it as a wedge issue -- and it worked.
``It certainly didn't help the Democratic Party to have gay marriage come up so closely to the election,'' said Bruce Cain, a political scientist at the University of California-Berkeley, who added that Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove planned to ``mobilize the evangelicals long before this issue was handed to him.''
Wednesday, Democrats, progressives and liberal voters across the country were still reeling from Bush's decisive victory. But early exit polls conducted for news organizations showed that evangelicals were more than one in five -- or 22 percent -- of all voters Tuesday. And 21 percent of all voters said that ``moral issues'' mattered more to them than taxes, education, health care, Iraq, terrorism or the economy.
In a conference call with reporters, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said gay marriage played a significant role in Bush's re-election.
``You had the issue of gay marriage in 11 states, and I think the results are pretty conclusive,'' she said. ``I think it became the rallying cry for the conservative voter and I think that voter turned out.''
In Ohio, 62 percent of voters said ``yes'' to Issue 1, one of the most sweeping bans on same-sex marriage in the country. It will amend the state constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman, and could bar public institutions, such as universities, from providing health insurance and other benefits to domestic partners -- gay or heterosexual. Legal challenges to the amendment are expected.
The Issue 1 campaign jump-started almost immediately after the Massachusetts Supreme Court began allowing gay marriages last spring.
In the process of collecting 557,000 signatures, Citizens for Community Values -- the Cincinnati-based group that pushed the amendment -- also registered 54,500 new voters. The group followed up with an enormous get-out-the-vote drive in churches across the state, organizing teams of supporters within each church.
``This was the issue that delivered Ohio for President Bush,'' said Phil Burress, who spearheaded the Issue 1 campaign. ``We mailed out 2.5 million bulletins to 17,000 churches. We called 2.9 million homes and identified 850,000 supporters. We called every one of those supporters on Monday and urged them to vote Yes on 1.''
Robin Tyler, a gay-rights activist in Los Angeles, said the gay community would not be the scapegoat for Kerry's defeat. Throughout the campaign, Kerry stressed that he believes marriage is between a man and a woman, and the Democratic Party carefully avoided any discussion of gay marriage at its July convention in Boston.
``Every civil rights movement has been blamed for the backlash of the radical right,'' said Tyler, executive director of DontAmend.com, an effort to stop the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. ``People want to blame us for the loss of the election, instead of looking at who we should be angry at, and that's the radical right. Stop blaming us. Get out and do the work.''
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