Gay Rights Big Loser (is that redundant?)

John Fund wraps up the electoral disaster for the gay rights crowd in today Opinion Journal Political Diary:

John Kerry's hopes for the White House evaporated with George Bush's narrow win in Ohio. Liberals picking through the voter returns are concluding that one of the unappreciated explanations for Mr. Kerry's loss in Ohio and his unexpectedly narrow win in neighboring Michigan was the presence of constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage on the ballot in both states.

"A large part of the fervor of evangelical Christians and social conservatives in Ohio to vote for Bush came from the gay marriage issue," liberal Newsday columnist Marie Cocco told me. Indeed, it might even be said that Mr. Kerry lost Ohio and the presidency because Margaret Marshall, the chief justice of Massachusetts' Supreme Court, insisted on ramming through 4-to-3 judicial activist opinion imposing the right to gay marriage last year. Social conservatives, fearful that the federal Defense of Marriage Act was threatened constitutionally, placed 13 initiatives banning gay marriage on state ballots this year. All passed, including all 11 on Tuesday's ballot.

The Human Rights Campaign Fund, the leading gay rights lobby, privately assured Congressional Democrats that the Massachusetts Supreme Court would not sanction gay marriage. The Fund opposed any dramatic move towards gay marriage for fear it would shift public attitudes on gays and energize conservative voters. "But the justices in the majority decided they had to be heroes," one donor to the Fund told me. "The unintended consequences of their decision helped contribute to last night's Democratic wreckage."

John Kerry would have been vulnerable to criticism on social issues even without gay marriage being on state ballots this week. More voters in this election cited moral values as the most important issue affecting their vote (22%) than any other issue including terrorism and the economy. Mr. Bush won 80% of those voters. There was never much of a chance that Mr. Kerry, an opponent of the death penalty in almost all circumstances and an opponent of the partial-birth abortion ban that passed Congress, could have gotten any traction with those voters.