Why Arizona? Or, Why Not Wisconsin?

BTW on Arizona, the big question is: why did what they do work in Arizona but not Wisconsin where they tried just as hard but 59 percent supported the amendment? Arizona is republican and Wisconsin is a dem state after all. AP is reporting:

"Going into Tuesday's elections, gay rights groups such as Human Rights Campaign considered Wisconsin their best chance to defeat a gay marriage ban. "

My current suspciion is twofold: a. the Wisconsin bishops were more successful at getting their message out. I know the Milwaukee archbishop sent a tape recorded sermon and ordered all his priests to play it, warning them there would be consequences for a refusal or for publicly disagreeing with the message. He also said "if you could say a few words in support of the message, it would be appreciated, but not required." (60 percent of the Catholic vote in Wisconsin supported it). CORRECTION: It was the Madison archbishop, not the Milwaukee archbishop who taped the sermon.

b. Unmarried cohabitants. I'm betting (looking for data right now) Arizona, a much younger state and far more Hispanic, has many many more unmarried cohabitants, so the message "you are taking away cohabitors rights" had more power there. UPDATE: Nope, that's not it. In Census 2000, 9.6 percent of coupled households were unmarried in Wisconsin compared to 10.7 percent in Arizona. (See Table 2).

The big obvious difference is that Arizona is 25 percent Latino and Wisconsin is. . .not. Here's what I'm telling the press BTW:

"The good news for gay marriage advocates is that in Arizona, they finally defeated a state marriage amendment. The bad news is that the vote had almost nothing to do with increasing public support for gay marriage," said Maggie Gallagher, president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, "They ran a campaign warning unmarried opposite-sex couples they might lose health benefits, and in Arizona it worked."

"In Wisconsin the same strategy failed miserably," said Gallagher, pointing to the 59 percent of voters who favored that state's similar marriage amendment. "Why? Look at the Catholic vote. Sixty percent of Catholics in Wisconsin support the state marriage amendment, much higher than in a state like Virginia (where Catholics voted "no" 48 percent to 52 percent). Can the Catholic vote on marriage in Wisconsin be repeated in other states? Increasingly that's where the political battle is going to lie."

UPDATE: In Colorado, according to this AP story, gay marriage advocates are saying the Ted Haggard story helped pass the state marriage amendment and defeat the domestic partnerships bill(note: Focus on the Family objects):

"Some experts suggested the results might be tied to fallout from the scandal surrounding the Rev. Ted Haggard, a Colorado evangelical leader accused of paying a man for sex.

Denver pollster Floyd Ciruli said the scandal could have helped sway undecided voters against Referendum I.

"What they had was a huge controversy on the front page related to the most controversial aspects of the gay lifestyle," Ciruli said.

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said Haggard's statement that his confessed "sexual immorality" stemmed from a dark and repulsive side of him helped reinforce that.

Carrie Gordon Earll, director of issues analysis for Focus on the Family's public policy arm, said that analysis "borders on sensationalism" and that most voters had already made up their minds before the Haggard scandal broke.

posted by maggie at 9:42 AM VOTE

6 Comments:

At 11/08/2006 9:55 AM,  Jenni said...

Would Arizona's rejection of the amendment have anything to do with its large number of fundamentalist Mormons (members of the off-shoot organizations, not the Latter-Day Saints)? That's the first thing a friend of mine thought, who worked in politics for seven years and was a Mormon missionary before that. It would be interesting to see how it did in the northern part of the state.

 

At 11/08/2006 10:15 AM,  Anonymous said...

I think it was because of Arizona's retiring Congressman Jim Kolbe (R). He is openly gay and very popular in Arizona.

 

At 11/08/2006 2:00 PM,  Chairm said...

The No side did not really make their campaign about SSM. It was about unwed cohabitation.

Thus, their campaign reinforced the fact that SSMers do NOT consider marital status to be special. They have just defended treatment of nonmarriage (albiet nonmarriage among man-woman pairs) as marriage.

If the proposal had been the simple "marriage is affirmed as the union of one man and one woman" it would have been a slamdunk.

The exit surveys, for what they are worth, also suggest that unwed non-white women may have made the biggest difference on the No side.

 

At 11/09/2006 10:37 AM,  Anonymous said...

The breakdown of the family amongst the poor has created it's own political base. Consider the poor woman of color in the city: She doesn't expect to get married, so she won't vote *for* anything that privileges marriage. She wants government handouts because she needs them. She wants big government for the same reason. She's joined a union for better wages.

Changing the culture amongst the poor to a culture of marriage would have huge political ramifications-- that's one reason it's so hard to do.

Not news to you, Maggie, but perhaps to other readers.

 

At 11/09/2006 5:04 PM,  Abe Delnore said...

Let me get this straight:

Exit polls show 60 percent of Wisconsin Catholics voted for the marriage definition amendment. Actual election returns show that the same amendment passed with 59 percent support. In other words, the Catholic vote was pretty much the same as the vote overall . . . as it increasingly is these days.

So what needs to be explained here? (In fact, that Morlino, the bishop of Madison, had to send out a cassette shows he knew Catholics were not going to be an especially strong constituency opposing the election. He was proven right.)

--Abe Delnore

 

At 11/10/2006 12:13 AM,  Chairm said...

He was proven right.

Yes, he was, in clearly communicating the affirmation of marriage as the union of man and woman.

Catholics who did not vote for the amendment did not necessarily support enactment of SSM as if it was marriage.

They may have agreed with their Church's teaching on the core issue. Indeed they may have agreed with the affirmation of the man-woman criterion on the basis of reason alone, but had different reaons for voting No and a constitutional matter.

Those reasons could very well be contingent upon their assessment that at this point the threat to the social institution of marriage remains indirect and the statutes provide enough protection, for now.

We should not assume that a No vote meant a pro-SSM vote among Catholics or any other groups.

 

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