Fri May 22, 2009 at 13:24:24 PM EDT
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I will admit when I am wrong. Grudgingly and with teeth clenched, but I'll admit my errors nonetheless.
So I was wrong.
The subject in question is gay marriage, specifically whether the movement for legalizing gay marriage had overreached a few years ago. It was February of 2004, just as John Kerry was sealing up the Democratic presidential nomination. Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, ordered the city clerk to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Rather predictably a storm of fecal matter erupted.
In the month between the directive from Newsom and the California Supreme Court's ruling to halt the marriages, some 4,000 gay and lesbian couples wed. Later that summer, the court went further still and voided all of those marriages. Still two months later, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, making it the first state in the union to legalize the practice.
There was something else going on that year: A presidential election. In response (partly, at least) to the actions of Newsom and the Massachusetts court, conservatives came out in droves to support 11 state-level amendments that banned gay marriage. They also backed George W. Bush for a second term.
After all of the controversy kicked up by Newsom, and all of the hand-wringing over Massachusetts, gays and lesbians in this country were left with a Republican president, an unfriendly Congress, and exactly one state in which they could wed. Early in Bush's second term, they got Samuel Alito and John Roberts, further shifting the Supreme Court away from their side of the argument.
To which, I said, the gay rights community had overreached. They had gone for it all without winning over enough of the court of public opinion. Gavin Newsom was looking for headlines and front page photos of his toothy smile. In their rush to utilize executive fiat and legislative override of majority opinion, the efforts to achieve equality for the gay community had been set back years, I argued, possibly decades.
I wasn't alone, by the way. The openly gay Representative Barney Frank criticized the San Francisco move as a "symbolic point" that did no favors to gay rights. |
| Brad Pilcher :: On Gay Marriage: I Was Wrong |
That was four years ago, and today we have a cresting wave of states legalizing same-sex marriage. Massachusetts has been joined by Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and Maine. New Jersey and New Hampshire have created the legal equivalent of gay marriage, which is something, I suppose. So has Maine, Hawaii, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Oregon, Washington and Maryland.
Public opinion on gay marriage has softened, not hardened, and while I could argue that has something to do with conservative overreaching following their victories in 2004, it doesn't matter to this mea culpa.
I was wrong. In politics, it is true that elections are the ultimate scoreboard, tactics matter, and timing is everything. In so many ways, Newsom's efforts were poorly timed and poorly game-planned. The Massachusetts court was right, so it's hard to argue with them, but it still played right into conservative arguments about judicial activism.
But nevertheless, perhaps Rep. Frank and myself (and others who lobbed similar criticisms) failed to properly gauge the power of "symbolic points." The issue of gay marriage was percolating, but not exactly boiling, before 2004. By pushing it into the national spotlight, Gavin Newsom and company began a national debate on this issue. They forced middle America to move beyond quietly supporting traditional marriage to openly staring down flesh-and-blood homosexuals and telling them their love was second-class. It's a debate that, through spurts and starts, the gay community and their friends are winning more than I'd have hoped.
I was wrong. I'm glad for that, but I welcome the debate and I welcome ideas about how to go beyond our recent successes. What tactics will be required next? What timing will work best? It's a political game, after all. The scoreboard is still lit up. |
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