Gavin Newsom 
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.
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