By Tali Woodward

On Election Day voters in 11 states considered laws to ban same-sex marriage. Every one passed resoundingly – including the measure in the integral, ultimately decisive state of Ohio. So the trend has become a very popular explanation for President George W. Bush's slim victory: the initiatives energized conservative voters, who then voted for the candidate they felt represented their "moral values," and the whole thing became the final nail in John Kerry's coffin.

Here in San Francisco, which has been stuck in a collective depression for the past week, people have the very human urge to blame someone for Bush's reelection – and Mayor Gavin Newsom is a convenient scapegoat. After all, in February Newsom single-handedly made this city the site of the country's first gay and lesbian weddings and put the issue of same-sex marriage in front of the nation in a concrete and immediate way.

But it's important to remember that Newsom didn't actually start the gay-marriage brouhaha – the previous November, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution guaranteed marriage rights to everyone, clearing the way for summer ceremonies. And Bush had already indicated his support for a federal amendment prohibiting queer weddings during his State of the Union address.

Of course, Democratic leaders were fretting from the beginning about how the weddings might affect the presidential election. And it didn't take long for them to lash out this week. Sen. Dianne Feinstein told reporters, "I think that whole issue has been too much, too fast, too soon ... And people aren't ready for it." Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told the New York Times, "It was a mistake in San Francisco compounded by people in Oregon, New Mexico, and New York. What it did was provoke a lot of fears." Even people who strongly supported the marriages in San Francisco angrily suggested Newsom could have at least waited until the election was over.

Gay marriage may well have been a factor in Bush's victory – if only because political strategist Karl Rove knew how best to manipulate the issue to get Christian conservatives to the polls. And the argument that letting gay marriage wend its way through the courts first would have contained the opposition has some limited validity (although it certainly didn't help with the integration of the University of Alabama).

But to explain a complicated presidential defeat with this one issue – or even more narrowly, with Newsom's actions – is ridiculously simplistic.

"There are a dozen different ways to slice it," state assemblymember Mark Leno, who will be reintroducing gay-marriage legislation Dec. 6, told the Bay Guardian. "I would respond that the issue is maybe a lack of leadership among Democrats. If we had more national leaders with the determination and conviction of Ted Kennedy [who supports gay marriage], maybe we wouldn't be getting run over on this."

There are, of course, numerous theories about what swung the election – Kerry's anemic campaign, the fact that we haven't had another terrorist attack, the Latino vote, the who-would-you-rather-have-a-beer-with theorem.

But of all the theories, possibly the most persuasive is that the Democrats again failed to stand for anything. Kerry's candidacy was defined by being the alternative to Bush's, not by some coherent ideology of its own.

And it's hard to think of something that would make Rove and his buddies more giddy, after securing the White House for another four years, than the Democratic Party responding to defeat by turning on one of its rising stars and eviscerating him for acting boldly and decisively.

Somehow, this is a problem Newsom seems instinctively to understand.

When asked about this criticism at his Nov. 3 press conference, Newsom responded, "Gay marriage was not something I conceived of; it's something we advanced. But you know what? I find it pretty repugnant in a day and age when we're all students of history, that people would caution, based on strong beliefs, someone who ... wants to right a wrong, wants to stop injustice. Because it took from 1948 to 1967 in this country – 19 years – for this country to come to grips with interracial marriage. It should not take that long to come to grips with same-sex marriage. And if it wasn't six months ago that we did it, do you think anybody would be arguing, after the Democrats lost, that we do it now when we lost this election? They'd say, 'Oh no, we certainly can't do that now.'

"It would never happen. So you have to stand on principle."

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