c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The voters have spoken, and many of them said, “Moral values.”

What they meant remains the debate among gays, no matter how clear it may be to opponents of same-sex marriage. A ban on those nuptials was approved Nov. 2 in 11 states _ everywhere it appeared on a ballot.

Did Republicans use gay marriage to frighten their evangelical base?

“Oh, they pounced on it, they just loved it,” said Phyllis Lyon, who wed her partner of 51 years on Feb. 12 in a San Francisco ceremony later found to have violated California law. “It wouldn’t have been an issue if they hadn’t hyped it from the rooftops.”

If the GOP did that, was it fair?

Of course, said Matt Daniels, author of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. “All parties use all issues all the time to win elections,” Daniels said.

Or might “moral values” mean something more than gay marriage?

“The reality is, this is about a larger set of cultural issues, most of which have nothing to do with same-sex marriage,” said Christopher Barron, political director of the gay Log Cabin Republicans.

Reactions are as varied as the gay community _ which is, as Warren Arbogast said, “as diverse as the sea is wide.”

Arbogast and his longtime partner, Steve Forssell, both 42, were deeply disappointed by the election. The two, born and still living in Washington, D.C., contacted a Canadian attorney and started the application process for permanent residency there.

“We don’t want to get married, that’s not it,” Arbogast said. “But when 11 states have the opportunity to do the right thing, and all 11 in landslide fashion go against a civil rights measure, it calls into question, do we want to be here? And the answer is no.”

That doesn’t mean, he added, “that we hate the U.S. or are rescinding our citizenship or hate the president. What it means is, we feel like `coloreds’ in the ’60s: good for TV, fun at a party, but certainly not equal.”

Matt, a 35-year-old gay man from Fort Wayne in the conservative “red state” of Indiana, agreed.

“When the civil rights of an entire class of people are put in the hands of a misinformed and ignorant electorate, justice is not served and it is not healthy for our country,” said Matt, who asked that his last name not be used. “I’ve lived here all my life, I know how people react to these issues.”

John B. Johnson says some gays’ inability to speak freely may have figured in the election’s outcome.

“There are people who wanted to speak out against the marriage amendment and couldn’t for absolute fear,” said Johnson, 35, who works in the office of government relations of the Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. “In no democracy can a full hearing of an issue be debated when the people most affected by it are afraid to speak out.”

But Daniels, president of the Washington-based Alliance for Marriage, says the election proved democracy works. Lawsuits pushing for gay marriage “displayed a contempt for values held by the vast majority of ordinary Americans,” he said.

“The American people have this stubborn notion of governing themselves,” Daniels said. “They reached for whatever democratic remedies were available to them.”

Jonathan D. Katz, a professor of gay history at Yale University, said the politicization of gay issues is “not an unusual tactic.”

“The right uses this whenever an external enemy disappears,” said Katz, head of Yale’s Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies.

“We saw it in 1952, after the end of World War II,” Katz said. Back then, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., led a purge of homosexuals in the government known as the “lavender scare.”

“We saw it in 1989 at the end of the communist era,” when Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., fought against federal funding of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s artwork, Katz said. “And we saw it this time, after the lack of success prosecuting a war against al-Qaida.”

Barron of the Log Cabin Republicans disagreed.

“This was much more about the cultural differences between middle America and what many people there view as the `liberal elite,”’ he said. “I believe in the goodness of the American people, and I don’t believe 59 million of them voted anti-gay.”

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Rebecca Maestri, president of the Virginia Log Cabin Republicans, was one of the gay “Austin 12” who were warmly received in April 2000 by then-candidate George W. Bush, Texas’ governor, who later declared himself a “better person” for having had the meeting. In April 2001, President Bush selected one of the 12, Scott Evertz, to head the Office of National AIDS Policy _ the first gay nominated to an executive branch position by a GOP president.

Now, despite a very different political reality, Maestri remains optimistic.

“We have huge opportunities here,” Maestri said. “I view it as a big function of education. We’ve got to realize it’s not always about candidates and elections, but schools and churches. We’ve got to get out on the same battlefield where the opposition is coming from.”

Back in San Francisco, Phyllis Lyon also is upbeat.

Lyon is 80. Her “spouse for life,” Del Martin, is 83. The two have seen decades of changes in treatment of gays in their half-century together.

“It’s been said that this gay marriage is too much too soon,” Lyon said. “Well, fiddle-diddle, it’s been around a long time.

“Actually it was back in the ’70s when gay marriage came up,” Lyon said. “But we were more concerned with employment rights, fair housing, basic things like not being considered illegal and immoral and sick.

“We won on all those other things,” she said.

“Now, more people need to know who we are, know that we’re just like them. We aren’t a special breed, we don’t have horns and tails.

“We’re just people.”

MO/LF/RB END SEFTON