Panelists speaking Monday evening at the UCLA School of Law
analyzed the impact of gay rights issues on the Nov. 2 election,
and discussed possible directions the movement can take given that
voters banned same-sex marriage in 11 states this month.
While six speakers presented diverging opinions, the message
they had for the public was the same ““ gay rights is not as
simple an issue as the media and politicians portray it.
The Charles R. Williams Project on Sexual Orientation Law
presented the panel of legal and political experts to a diverse
crowd of over 100 listeners, including a second-year Spanish
student fulfilling a course requirement and an entrepreneur from
Manhattan Beach hoping to gain insight into relations between gay
rights and today’s political atmosphere.
The event was on the law school calendar long before November,
and Robert Sears, law school professor and Williams Project
executive director, said he was not surprised by election
returns.
“From our perspective, it was completely foreseeable.
It’s been evident since early in this election that gay
marriage was going to be huge as a wedge issue,” he said.
Ballots that voters cast opposing gay marriage in eight of the
11 states also banned civil unions. Some politicians, including
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have pointed to gay marriage as an
issue that may have helped swing the election the
Republicans’ way.
But two panelists, Los Angeles Times Director of Polling Susan
Pinkus and Hunter College Professor Kenneth Sherrill, pointed to
statistics that told a different story. While Evangelical Christian
voters who are largely opposed to gay marriage turned out in droves
across the nation and in swing states, statistical evidence shows
gay marriage was not a decisive issue in Bush’s victory, they
said.
Sherrill said Democrats should not let election results drive
them away from supporting gay marriage, which he believes is being
used as a scapegoat by politicians trying to figure out what went
wrong with Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry’s
campaign.
Some believe gains including a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial
Court ruling supporting same-sex marriage created a backlash
against gay rights that helped decide the election.
But Sherrill, who participated in the Civil Rights Movement of
the 1960s, said the “too much, too fast, too soon”
argument is familiar and “no fun to hear.”
The scapegoating is “undeserved as much as it is
unwelcomed,” he said.
Though it is difficult to gauge the exact impact gay marriage
had on the election, the Republican Party was definitely able to
capitalize on the issue, said UCLA political science and psychology
Professor David Sears.
“Gay marriage is owned by Republicans because most
American voters are against gay marriage,” he said.
But while the 11 state amendments and an increasingly
right-leaning Republican Senate were undeniable setbacks for the
gay rights movement, Sears said feelings toward gay rights in the
nation are not as sour as they may seem.
The past couple decades have seen a gradual but steady trend
toward broader tolerance of the gay community by the mainstream, he
said.
C. Martin Meekins, Log Cabin Republicans national board member,
said he believes playing the gay marriage card helped his party
tremendously.
“There’s no way to sugar coat it ““we lost …
The wedge issue strategy worked. It makes me sick,” he
said.
“We can say it didn’t play a role, but it
did,” he added.
A religious and gay Republican whose origins trace back to a
small town in east Texas, Meekins said gay rights activists must
reach out to those in the middle of the country instead of focusing
an excessive amount of energy on regions such as New York and Los
Angeles, where populations already strongly favor gay rights.
“More than winning the courts … we have to learn to win
the hearts and minds of Americans,” Meekins said.
Just having a conversation about what it means to be gay can
make a defining difference, he said.
“It happens all the time,” he said, reflecting on
his experiences speaking with people from backgrounds similar to
his own.
Margot Albert, a second-year law student, said listening to
speakers’ perspectives raised more questions in her own mind
about how the gay rights movement should proceed.
While activists ideally would push for full and immediate
rights, “there is a reality that people did come out and vote
because of this gay marriage legislation,” she said.