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Gay rights left on sidelines after election

By Valerie Richardson (Contact) | Tuesday, November 18, 2008

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DENVER

The 2008 election was a success for nearly every segment of the Democratic coalition, with one stark exception: gay rights advocates. The same voters who backed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and defeated conservative ballot measures on issues such as abortion, assisted suicide and marijuana legalization suddenly veered from the script when it came to advancing rights for gays.

In three states - Arizona, California and Florida - voters approved amendments that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Two of those states, California and Florida, went Democratic in the presidential vote.

In Arkansas, voters approved a ballot measure prohibiting unmarried couples - and thus gay couples - from adopting children. In Hamtramck, Mich., a liberal Detroit suburb that went overwhelmingly Democratic, voters overturned a city ordinance that gave protected civil rights status to gay and transgendered residents.

But the highest-profile defeat for gay rights supporters was the passage of California's Proposition 8, which overturned a state Supreme Court ruling earlier in the year that legalized same-sex marriage.

Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund, called this year's outcome "incredibly disappointing" but added that the long-term trend on the issue was encouraging.

"One way we're looking at this issue is that even though it's heartbreaking that we lost in those states, the progress we've made in eight years is astounding," she said.

Gay rights supporters were quick to notice the impact of the black and Hispanic vote during this election cycle. In California and Florida, black voters came out to the polls in record numbers to support Mr. Obama, then turned around and voted in favor of traditional marriage by a margin of 70 percent to 30 percent.

"You can make the argument that Barack Obama passed Proposition 8," said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. "Had turnout among African-American voters been along more traditional lines, Proposition 8 probably would have failed."

In Florida, supporters of gay marriage were lulled into a false sense of security by surveys that showed Amendment 2 going down to defeat. A Mason-Dixon poll released Nov. 1 showed Florida voters backing the measure by 55 percent to 35 percent, not enough to clear the 60 percent needed to amend the state constitution.