DID GAY MARRIAGE HELP RE-ELECT BUSH?: From the San Francisco Chronicle

...Gay and lesbian leaders faced a sober rethinking of their strategy -- which some said must include reaching out to churches and red-state voters who gave Republicans their sweep of the House, Senate and White House.

Some, however, fiercely denied that their drive for marriage equality contributed to Kerry's narrow loss. The Massachusetts senator opposed a federal constitutional ban.

"There's no evidence whatsoever to suggest that gay marriage tipped the scale in any state," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Others -- from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein to leaders of the Christian right to outside analysts -- disagreed.

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.

They also defended their legal drive for marriage rights, which won a historic victory with the Goodridge decision in Massachusetts last November that ushered in the nation's first same-sex marriages last spring and triggered a national storm over gay and lesbian unions in the middle of a presidential campaign.

"It's hard for me to say Goodridge tipped everything when these folks were making anti-gay law a centerpiece of their strategy since 1996," said Mary Bonauto, the lawyer for the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders who won the case.

Bonauto said that by the time Goodridge was decided, 37 states already had "defense of marriage" statutes on the books, and a constitutional ban had already been introduced in Congress. ...

Foreman, however, pointed to Kerry's vote gains in Ohio, Michigan and Oregon, all of which had the same-sex ballot measures, over Democrat Al Gore's tallies in the 2000 race as proof the measures did not contribute to Kerry's defeat. ...

Nathan Persily, a University of Pennsylvania professor of law and politics, agreed that same-sex marriage became a proxy for the larger moral issues that so moved voters.

"John Kerry realized very late in the game that his persona as a secular Northeasterner was something that many Americans found foreign to them," he said, noting Kerry's declarations of his Catholic faith and speeches from Florida pulpits two Sundays before the election. ...

Cheryl Jacques, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, borrowed, perhaps not coincidentally, the moral values rhetoric of an earlier civil rights movement to defend the drive for marriage equality while conceding its difficulty.

"As Martin Luther King wrote in his 'Letters from a Birmingham Jail,' '' Jacques said, "there is no convenient time to ask those who oppose equality to think more kindly about it."

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