Word: gays
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...will use those same tactics - statewide referendums aimed at overruling court decisions or rebuffing reluctant legislators - to restrict other rights. In Arkansas, for example, voters easily passed an initiative that did what state legislators had refused to do: ban adoptions and even foster-parent roles for unmarried couples, including gays. Now the state joins Utah, Florida and Mississippi as a place where gay couples cannot adopt. Trantalis and others are worried that even as the gay rights movement continues to win court victories, those very victories may prompt stronger and stronger backlashes, jeopardizing hard-won rights from local governments...
...said, how much more controversial Roe v. Wade would be now had the court issued the decision after more than half the states had held statewide elections on the issue. "Tuesday's rulings have made it much more costly for any court to reach a conclusion in favor of gay marriage," he said...
...results on Nov. 4 were negative for advocates of gay marriage outside California as well: citizens in Florida and Arizona also voted to make gay marriage unconstitutional. The vote was overwhelming in Florida, where voters favored Barack Obama in the presidential race but still decided 63% to 37% to make marriage available to heterosexual couples only. And in John McCain's home state of Arizona, voters reversed course just two years after defeating a similar, if more sweeping, ban on gay marriage...
California's vote was closer but not that close. Large numbers of those who voted Democratic chose to limit marriage to straight couples. They did so after a long campaign dominated by heavy spending from gay rights advocates. The vote was the first to come in a state where gay marriage had already been legalized. Some 18,000 couples wed before Election Day, and public-opinion polls had shown that support for the amendment trailed badly just days before the vote...
...teleconference last week among more than 100 gay legal scholars and others who support gay marriage, the mood was dour. "This has cast a pall" over what had otherwise been a historic election on Nov. 4, said D'Arcy Kemnitz, executive director of the National Lesbian Gay Law Association. Longtime gay rights advocate Dean Trantalis of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and others on the conference call expressed concern that the gay rights movement had become too focused on marriage, and is now paying the price in other more critical areas. "Marriage was never our issue," Trantalis said. "It was thrust upon...