[Vision2020] Very Sad News: California voters approve constitutional ban on same-sex marriage

[Scott Dredge]

The fight will just continue to an inevitable victory for equal rights for same sex couples.  Santa Clara county where prop 8 was crushed by a 10 point margin is 'Silicon Valley'.  This issue will be resolved in favor of equality over time.

-Scott

> Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 08:10:16 -0800
> From: chasuk at gmail.com
> To: vision2020 at moscow.com
> Subject: [Vision2020] Very Sad News: California voters approve	constitutional ban on same-sex marriage
> 
> http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10901475?source=most_emailed
> 
> After an intense campaign that cost more than $75 million,
> California's voters have approved a constitutional ban on same-sex
> marriage, dealing a huge blow to the gay rights movement and likely
> setting the stage for another round of court battles over the volatile
> issue.
> 
> While the Yes on 8 campaign claimed victory just before midnight, the
> numbers continued to play out in their favor this morning. Still,
> advocates of same-sex marriage had clung to hopes that a surge of
> support from uncounted votes could still overcome the ban.
> 
> But this morning, with 95 percent of precincts reporting, the measure
> passed with 52 percent in favor, and 47.9 percent opposed. There are
> an untold number of absentee and provisional ballots left to be
> counted, according to the Associated Press, but it will be hard to
> overcome the 5 percent margin. "I think the story is that a strong
> majority of Californians support traditional marriage and they want to
> see it protected," said Frank Schubert, manager of the Yes on 8
> campaign. "I think the story is we ran a far better campaign than the
> other side. I think we had 100,000 people that gave of their resources
> and their time."
> 
> The measure trims the number of states in which gays and lesbians can
> legally marry from three to two. But in striking the most populous and
> culturally influential state from that list, social conservatives and
> religious leaders have scored a much broader victory, likely limiting
> for years the hopes of gay rights leaders to allow same-sex couples to
> marry across the United States.
> 
> For same-sex marriage supporters, it was a bitter loss, after major
> polls had consistently shown the measure losing through the fall.
> 
> In San Jose, Ronni Pahl, a member of one of the first two same-sex
> couples married in Santa Clara County, watched the returns with her
> wife, Hannah, and son Isaiah with a potent mix of emotion.
> 
> "It's bittersweet right now because we just watched the first
> African-American president elected. We were watching it with our
> African-American son, there were tears coming out of our eyes, and we
> went to look at what's happening at 8," Pahl said. "We're speechless
> right now."
> 
> In Santa Clara County, Proposition 8 was soundly defeated, losing by a
> 10 percent margin. The measure also trailed in Alameda, San Mateo and
> Santa Cruz counties, as well as in San Francisco.
> 
> But as election evening wore on, that opposition was overwhelmed by
> more conservative areas of the state, particularly in the inland
> counties. The same-sex marriage ban had attracted more than 60 percent
> of the vote in Riverside County, and two-thirds of the vote in San
> Joaquin County, with more than half of precincts reporting in those
> counties.
> 
> And despite the decisive win of Democratic nominee Barack Obama, in
> California and the rest of the country, polls were wrong in another
> way: They had predicted that the tide of Obama voters would block
> Proposition 8 from passing. But even in Santa Clara County, Obama
> captured a much higher share of the vote than the proportion who voted
> against Proposition 8.
> 
> Schubert said the Yes on 8 campaign never trusted the polls.
> 
> "We've always felt that if we were tied going into Election Day, or a
> few points behind, we were going to win," he said. The decision "is
> something that I think will reverberate across the nation and around
> the world."
> 
> While the new constitutional ban goes into effect immediately, it's
> less clear what the effect will be on same-sex couples who married
> from June 16 through Tuesday. While Attorney General Jerry Brown has
> said he does not believe Proposition 8 is retroactive, that issue is
> likely to wind up back in the courts, as well as an anticipated
> challenge to whether it is constitutional for California to revive its
> ban on same-sex marriage.
> 
> The race began to tighten when the Yes on 8 campaign began running ads
> that suggested that churches could lose their tax-exempt status if
> clergy refused to do gay weddings and that second-graders would be
> taught about gay marriage.
> 
> The figurehead of those ads: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom,
> proclaiming in a speech that gay marriage was now legal in California
> "whether you like it or not."
> 
> Yes on 8 supporters were feeling confident Tuesday night, even as the
> polls began to close.
> 
> "The momentum has really been with us," said Chip White, the press
> secretary for the Yes on 8 campaign. "The trend has been in our
> direction ever since we went with that Gavin Newsom ad on Sept. 29."
> 
> David McCuan, a political-science professor at Sonoma State
> University, said the move to victory for the Yes on 8 campaign might
> have begun here, when a campaign pushing for passage of an initiative
> began to behave like a classic "No" campaign — by injecting doubt
> about the effect of a proposed "change" into the minds of voters.
> 
> Because gay marriage was so new in California, it allowed Yes on 8
> campaign manager Frank Schubert to operate as if what was technically
> the status quo was actually a proposed change, and trying to inject
> doubt into the minds of voters about that "change."
> 
> Schubert "essentially ran a No side campaign on the Yes side of this
> ballot measure and that has made it more sophisticated and less
> faith-based message," McCuan said.
> 
> Given Obama's victory, "it's a stunning, stinging defeat," McCuan
> said. "This is a Democratic blue wave and standing out in one of the
> bluest of the blue states is this huge red result."
> 
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