WASHINGTON (ABP) — While results of the Nov. 3 off-year state elections suggest that reports of the Religious Right’s demise are greatly exaggerated, the movement’s influence on election outcomes throughout the country was rather mixed.
Religious Right-backed candidates won Virginia’s top statewide offices by wide margins; an opponent of same-sex marriage won the New Jersey governorship; and Maine voters appear to have upended a law, passed earlier this year by legislators, that legalized gay marriage.
But, simultaneously, voters in Washington state appear to have approved an “everything-but-marriage” law that offers civil unions — with statewide rights identical to marriage — to same-sex couples. Voters in the Michigan city of Kalamazoo overwhelmingly approved an ordinance that would expand the city’s non-discrimination laws to prevent people from being denied employment, housing or public accommodations on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity.
“Many factors played a role in the outcome of yesterday’s elections, so it’s important not to exaggerate the Religious Right’s influence,” said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in a press release. Lynn’s Washington-based group frequently battles religious conservatives. “But at the same time, Americans need to know that this movement’s leaders are still influential in American politics. They haven’t given up on their crusade to impose their fundamentalist beliefs on everyone through government action.”
Many religious conservatives, meanwhile, portrayed the results as a victory for their cause. "Those who were ready to inscribe 'RIP' on the tombstone of conservative and pro-family values following the 2008 elections got a jolting wakeup call at the polls," said Mathew Staver, Founder of the conservative group Liberty Counsel and dean of the law school at Liberty University, in a Liberty press release. "Conservative and pro-family values have never been dead or dying: we just needed principled candidates who can articulate these values, and when that happens, we win.”
But the day’s results were a bit more complicated for social conservatives than Staver’s analysis might suggest.
Social issues not important in Va., N.J.
Exit polls in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial contests suggest abortion, marriage and other issues were not nearly as important to voters as state-government subjects such as transportation, taxes and job creation.
The victorious Republican candidate in Virginia, former top state attorney Bob McDonnell, had bested Democratic state Sen. Creigh Deeds by a margin of more than 15 points at last count. Deeds, a social moderate, was widely viewed as having run a weaker campaign than his rival.
McDonnell focused his rhetoric on tax, transportation and education issues. He shied away from the controversial social issues that spook middle-class moderates who populate the state’s voter-rich northern counties that lie in the Washington metropolitan area. Nonetheless, McDonnell has a long record of opposing gay rights and abortion rights.
Deeds spent much of the latter part of the race attacking a master’s-degree thesis McDonnell wrote in 1989, when he was a 34-year-old graduate student at what is now known as Regent University in Virginia Beach. The Christian school was founded by Religious Right leader Pat Robertson, and McDonnell outlined a plan in the document for strengthening traditional families. The paper asserted that women working outside the home was detrimental to families.
Exit polls showed that the thesis only hurt McDonnell marginally. While 22 percent of voters said the document made them less likely to support the Republican and only 8 percent said it made them more likely to support him, 65 percent said it was not a factor in their vote.
N.Y. House race
In a special election for a House seat from an upstate New York district in GOP hands for several election cycles, a moderate Democratic candidate won a race that may say as much about division in GOP ranks as it does about strength among Democrats. He beat a Conservative Party candidate who had gained the backing of nationally prominent social conservatives and many local Republicans — thus forcing the official GOP candidate, a social liberal, out of the race.
Democrat Bill Owens beat Conservative Doug Hoffman. Large parts of the district haven’t been represented by a Democrat in Congress in nearly 150 years, although it is generally moderate and President Obama did carry the district by a significant margin in 2008.
The contest was a special election necessitated by the resignation of moderate GOP Rep. John McHugh. A libertarian-leaning Republican — state lawmaker Dede Scozzafava — had been picked by county GOP chairs as the official party nominee for the spot. But many conservative Republicans balked at the choice, particularly because Scozzafava supports abortion rights and gay marriage.
She dipped behind Hoffman and Owens in the polls, and her fate was sealed after several nationally known players endorsed Hoffman. They included former Alaska Gov. and GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and broadcast personalities Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
Scozzafava ended up calling off her campaign just days before the election, although she remained on the ballot.
Maine and marriage
Gay-rights activists dealt with what one called “deep and bitter disappointment” after losing a fight against the state’s same-sex marriage law. Earlier this year, Maine’s legislators and governor made the state the fifth in the nation — and the fourth in New England — to legalize same-sex marriage.
Opponents of gay marriage used a process that allows balloting on a “people’s veto” of laws approved by the Maine Legislature. The effort set up a national proxy battle over marriage equality.
While the National Organization for Marriage and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland poured funds into the anti-gay-marriage effort, national gay-rights groups recruited cash and volunteers from across the country to defend the law. In the 30 states that had previously cast ballots on same-sex marriage, majorities always opposed the practice. But gay-rights advocates had hoped Maine — in one of the most secular and socially liberal regions of the country — would be more amenable.
But, in the end, the state’s liberal, urban voters who supported gay marriage by wide margins weren’t enough to defeat voters from its heavily rural and Catholic western and northern regions, who voted even more heavily against gay marriage. The repeal effort won with, at last count, an approximate 53-to-47 percent margin.
Gay-rights wins in Mich., Wash.
But gay-rights advocates pointed to what appeared to be a narrow win for Washington state’s civil-unions law and the resounding win — by a nearly 2-to-1 margin — for the Kalamazoo non-discrimination ordinance.
“The anti-gay forces around the country only win — temporarily — by exporting their lies and messages of fear from state to state,” said Kevin Cathcart, executive director of the gay-rights group Lambda Legal. “But the tide of history is turning our way. We will win by keeping our focus, and our energies, trained on the horizon.”
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Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.
Previous ABP story:
Same-sex marriage advances in Maine; N.H. and N.Y. next (5/3/2009)