I really will post more of my own thoughts soon.

I was going to write a long diatribe on my thoughts regarding the hullabaloo over whether all the gay marriage banning initiatives helped cost Kerry the election, but another blog which I frequent has already tackled it fairly much the same as I would, so instead, I'm going to borrow his post:

"Friday, November 05, 2004
Since Tuesday, there's been a lot of soul searching among people on the left...wondering where they went on. Today's NY Times had an article about how the national Dem. party is pissed at Gavin Newsome for allowing gay marriage in SF. Salon posted a defense of Newsome that seemed ambivilent about whether gay marriage cost Kerry the election. Ryan has written posts where he says Democrats should abandon the gay marriage issue in order to focus on winning causes.

Thing is...I didn't know the Democrats were the big defenders of gay marriage. Plenty of Democratic legislators voted for our state's marriage amendment. I think those legislators were dumbasses, because the amendment was a ploy to bring conservative voters to the polls. Kerry and Edwards were both against gay marriage. Kerry was actually in favor of anti-gay marriage amendments to state constitutions. The only way they differed from Bush on this issue was they didn't support amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Is that what the Democrats should have gotten behind to prove that they aren't pansy-ass, value-less, heathens?

It wouldn't have made any difference. All this same sex marriage stuff started with last year's Supreme Court ruling that legalized sodomy. After that, everyone started connecting the dots: first sodomy, then marriage. Massachusetts and San Francisco only accelerated that process. The current backlash was unprevantable. The timing would always work to Republicans' advantage.

I think people who say gay marriage spoiled the election want to try stuffing it back into pandora's box. That's not going to happen. Gay people are never going to act as a monolith (Nearly 1/4 of us voted for Bush, for god's sake!). I don't see how any blogger, columnist, or politician is going to convince everyone not to fight in court for the right to get married.

I'm going to end this rambling gay marriage post with a section of an e-mail I wrote on the same subject today:


I'm not sure what you're suggesting the Democrats
should do. Should they back a Constitutional
amendment banning same-sex marriage? OK, now we've
given up on the marriage front. What do they do when
conservative Republicans start pressing for banning
gay people from adopting children? Do the Dems get on
that bandwagon as well? How about calls to ban gay
teachers? OK, the Democrats can give up that issue
too.

What about abortion? That's the other big bugaboo
that Republicans use to scare people into voting for
them. Maybe the Dems. should back off that as well.
In fact--maybe the Democrats should do everything they
can to make themselves look exactly like the
Republicans...maybe then they would start winning
elections.

Or maybe not.

The Democrats lost this race, because they ran a
shitty campaign. They let Rove and his crew control
the agenda almost entirely. They offered no vision of
what a Kerry presidency would look like, and got
bogged down in talking about what their candidate and
the president did 30+ years ago. John Kerry did come
across as a flip flopper, which hurt his credibility
with the voters. Laying the blame for this on gay
marriage is just more of the same scapegoating faggots
have been subject to for decades. The fact is that if
the candidate had run a better campaign, he would have
won."