'Golden Opportunity; How the GOP helped bring gay marriage to California'

Link: The Advocate
by James Kirchick

Long article. Read full text.

Excerpt:

In 1978 former California governor Ronald Reagan announced his opposition to the Briggs Initiative, a proposed law that would have not only barred gay people from teaching in the state’s public schools but also allowed administrators to fire any instructor suspected of “advocating, imposing, encouraging, or promoting” homosexuality. Prospects for the initiative looked bright at first: Gay rights measures were being rejected across the country. Reagan, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976 as a movement conservative against the more moderate Gerald Ford, was gearing up for the 1980 race and could scarcely afford to offend the “family values” crowd. Nevertheless, he declared that the initiative had “the potential for real mischief” and that “innocent lives could be ruined.” Initial polls showed 61% of voters in favor of the initiative and 31% opposed, but after Reagan announced his opposition the public mood shifted dramatically to 45% in favor and 43% opposed. The measure was eventually defeated by over a million votes.

Exactly 30 years later, another Republican governor of California announced his opposition to an antigay ballot measure. Asked on April 11 at the Log Cabin Republicans’ annual convention in San Diego about his stance on a proposed state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “I will always be there to fight against that.” He labeled the campaign a “total waste of time” and predicted that enactment of the amendment “will never happen in California, because I think the California people are much further along on that issue.”

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Schwarzenegger is the most prominent Republican opponent of the marriage amendment, and his opposition doesn’t come as a surprise to California gay rights activists, especially Republican ones. Log Cabin Republicans president Patrick Sammon points to the fact that the governor has signed more gay-friendly laws than any other current governor in the country. Indeed, Schwarzenegger is just one part, albeit a significant part, of a larger story, one that may come as a surprise to many gays. As much as liberals have been at the forefront of gay rights struggles across the country, Republicans too have played a crucial role in bringing marriage equality to California. 

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Gay Republicans also hope to recruit prominent GOP figures to speak out against the amendment. Ward Connerly, a former member of the University of California board of regents and one of the country’s foremost opponents of affirmative action, is one such conservative icon. Connerly, who is black and grew up in the Deep South, told me that efforts to amend his state’s constitution to ban gay marriage remind him of antimiscegenation laws. “For anyone to say that this is an issue for people who are gay and that this isn’t about civil rights is sadly mistaken,” he says. “If you really believe in freedom and limited government, to be intellectually consistent and honest you have to oppose efforts of the majority to impose their will on people.” Connerly is not a new friend to gay rights advocates; when he served on the board of regents, he championed domestic-partner benefits for gay faculty members.

The last and most important element of Republican support for gay marriage will be GOP voters themselves. Sammon says that with the overwhelming majority of state Democrats in support of the court’s decision, Republicans and independents will be essential swing voters. Thus the role of gay and gay-friendly conservatives in convincing their ideological brethren to vote against the amendment will be crucial. Sammon proudly points out that, according to a recent Field Institute poll, only 57% of California Republicans support the constitutional amendment. He says Log Cabin is working with local Republican groups (particularly the California Federation of Republican Women, which has a long tradition of social moderation), organizing calls to influential talk-radio programs, and encouraging its members to write op-eds for local newspapers. So far, California gay Republicans have had a largely positive working relationship with the broader gay rights movement in the state. James Vaughn, head of Log Cabin’s California chapter, tells me that some gay activists “talk in the media about ‘right-wing’ this and that, and I have to stop and raise my hand and say, ‘If you have swing voters who happen to be Republicans and you call them right-wingers, they’re going to think they have to join [gay marriage opponents] on this measure,’” he says. “They look at me like I have three heads.”

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So with marriage out of the way—for the moment—as a national political issue, gay rights advocates will be able to concentrate solely on how to win equality for the people they represent. They’re sure to learn many lessons in the coming months. The most important may be that Republicans can be friends, not enemies.

[jw]