In this SFGATE article, the question is whether young San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's enthusiastic act of ordering the City to marry same-sex couples earlier this year had the perverse effect of providing a rallying cause around which to mobilize Pres. Bush's conservative, sometimes religious-right, voter base, sufficient to re-elect him over Sen. Kerry.
California Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein thought there was something to it.
"Meeting with reporters outside her San Francisco home Wednesday afternoon, Feinstein was asked whether Mayor Gavin Newsom's issuance of marriage licenses -- which Bush cited as a factor in his decision to support a federal constitutional ban -- had caused a problem for Democrats.
"I believe it did energize a very conservative vote," Feinstein said. "It gave them a position to rally around. The whole issue has been too much, too fast, too soon.''
Several gay leaders insisted, however, that the marriage measures were mostly in states Bush was expected to carry anyway. Even Ohio's measure, they insist, did not hurt Kerry."
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Maybe it's practical, in political terms to postpone recognizing rights that people feel they are entitled to have.
No doubt it was good, practical politics for Abraham Lincoln to postpone emancipating slaves in border states that stuck with the Union, to prevent them splitting too. And to downplay the end of slavery to keep the North cooperating also.
The effect is to tell the slaves, "Keep slaving away awhile longer, we expect to get around to you soon enough."
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That's a tough way to go, isn't it?
How would YOU like to be the one told to hang on just awhile longer.
Pie in the sky.
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Good for Gavin.
He saw the right thing to do and did it, politics be damned.
Now they're trying to hang Bush around his neck.
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Is it any skin off your back that two people want to consider themselves married?
Explain to me how that's any of your concern.
And if it isn't your's, then why your neighbor's, or a hundred-fifty million of your neighbors.
Maybe it's none of government's business!
What do you think about that?
Not me, but that.
