Traditionalists won in California, but the tide may turn against them in the end.
By Michael Brendan http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3798
In a clip played endlessly on their televisions this fall, http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6006 is about love into voters who are now convinced that it’s about ‘who’s-in-charge-here.’” The scene made Newsom the unwitting star of the successful campaign to overturn California’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.
This wasn’t the first time Newsom has inadvertently helped the cause of traditional marriage. His unilateral attempt to legalize gay marriage in http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4181, surveying the damage voters had done to the cause of same-sex marriage, declared it “the year of the values voter.”Superficially, 2008 seems like a similar success for social conservatives. Following the passage of marriage amendments in Arizona and Florida, as well as California, Maggie Gallagher wrote at National Review Online, “when it comes to marriage, there is no such thing as a blue state or a red state. Americans support marriage as the union of husband and wife.” But a closer look at the election results and the legal developments in the past year suggests that 2008 is in fact the year the marriage debate tipped in favor of same-sex marriage.
Only Arizona passed its traditional marriage initiative by 2004-like margins. While only 38 percent voted against the Florida initiative, the measure passed the required 60-percent threshold by just 2 points. In California, Proposition 8 passed by a bare 52 percent of the vote, and exit polls seem to attribute its success to an abnormally high turnout of socially conservative black voters. In Connecticut, voters had the chance to resist their state’s pro-gay-marriage Supreme Court decision, Kerrigan v. Public Health, by voting for a constitutional convention. That initiative failed by 20 points.
The events in California and Connecticut present new legal challenges to social conservatives.
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/nov/17/00020/