MISSOURI REACTIONS: From the NY Times

Missouri voters' overwhelming decision to bar gay marriage with a constitutional amendment has sent a resounding message around the country.

With at least nine other states expected to vote on similar amendments this fall, including four swing states in the presidential race, leaders on each side of the issue viewed Missouri's 70 percent approval of the amendment on Tuesday as a glimpse of what might lie ahead. ...

Opponents of the amendments said that they were distressed, even hurt, by the outcome in Missouri, but that they planned to study exactly what had happened in the brief months of campaigning there to learn which strategies had worked and which failed. The spending had been lopsided here, with supporters of gay marriage spending $450,000 to fight the measure with television advertising and polling, compared with $19,000 spent by opponents. ...

In the days leading up to Missouri's voting, polls had shown that the ban on gay marriage would very likely pass, but with the support of about 60 percent of voters, so the size of the approval startled some people. The amendment passed in every county except the City of St. Louis, where it failed by about 3,500 votes out of about 60,000 cast.

Few had anticipated the scale of the turnout either. In state records kept since 1980, there had never been comparable participation in an August primary. Nearly 1.5 million people voted, a fact that Vicky Hartzler, spokeswoman for the Coalition to Protect Marriage in Missouri, attributed to grass-roots efforts, including notes in church bulletins, neighbors holding up signs along busy thoroughfares and preachers talking to their congregations.

"Even though we were outspent and we had a national political machine descend on our state to try and defeat this," Ms. Hartzler said, "people got out and worked and called neighbors and said a lot of prayers."

On Friday, leaders of Missouri's anti-gay-marriage effort will offer advice in a conference call to those pushing for amendments in other states, she said.
Her own best advice to the other states, Ms. Hartzler said, would not be about politics. "The No. 1 thing is prayer," she said, "and a passion for protecting the sanctity of marriage."

The group that led the opposition to a ban in Missouri, the Constitution Defense League, said it would also probably share observations with its counterparts elsewhere. Next month, voters in Louisiana will cast ballots on a similar amendment, and even Christopher Daigle, a leader of the opposition there, conceded on Wednesday that he would not be surprised if that state's results mirrored Missouri's.

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posted by Eve at 3:27 PM VOTE

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