Advocating No on Prop. 8 as a Matter of Principle

by Karen Ocamb
photo by Fidel Lirio and Brooke Farrington

When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was a boy — palling around with rich Gordon Getty’s son, Billy, struggling with dyslexia in school and using a partial baseball scholarship to get a political science degree from Santa Clara University — the idea of being the poster boy for marriage equality was as far-fetched as the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series.

But both those miracles happened in 2004. On Valentine’s Day, on his 36th day in office as mayor, Newsom directed the city clerk to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in defiance of the state constitution that only recognized marriage between a man and a woman. After thousands of marriages and a series of court battles, he was vindicated when the California Supreme Court ruled this past May 15 that the “fundamental” right of marriage should not be denied to same-sex couples.

Now Newsom is on the frontlines in the battle over Prop. 8, the constitutional amendment on the Nov. 4 ballot that would overturn the high court’s ruling.

For Newsom, Prop. 8 stands against everything he learned about equality from his father, a California appeals court judge.

“It’s a family thing,” Newsom said in an interview with IN Los Angeles magazine after he was honored by the Long Beach Lambda Democratic Club on Oct. 5, when asked the source of his passion about marriage equality.

“It’s intuitive. It’s at the dinner table. It’s a grandmother that taught me to walk picket lines and never cross them. It was a father who said we can’t go to that movie,” Newsom said. “I was 8 years old, and I said, ’Why?’ ‘Because we’d cross a picket line.’ And I’d go, ‘But dad—this movie. I don’t care about the pickets.’ And he’d go, ‘Trust me, son, you’ll eventually understand. It’s just the fundamental values of decency. Respect. Human dignity.’

“The best this country’s had to offer has always been when we’ve stood on these principles and we fought against those who said we were moving too quickly or too fast,” Newsom said. “I mean, Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s critics were not whites—they were African-American preachers that thought he was pushing too hard and that there would be other, unintended consequences, and we couldn’t get those other things done.

“That’s exactly the arguments that are being used today: We can’t get to those other things so we have to calculate and we have to allow a certain group of people to be diminished so that we can advance principles outside it,” Newsom said. “You can’t do that. It’s wrong. There’s right and wrong. It’s wrong to calculate that something’s more important than someone’s fundamental equal rights. There’s nothing more important than that.”

It is no small political irony that Newsom was the “star” of the anti-gay Yes on 8 campaign’s first commercial about “activist judges,” and he is still taking heat for officiating at the wedding of a lesbian public school teacher whose first-graders were treated to a field trip, conceived by a parent, to wish their teacher well with rose petals and bubbles.

“It’s just utterly unreasonable that a public-school field trip would be to a same-sex wedding,” Chip White, press secretary for the Yes on 8 campaign, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “This is overt indoctrination of children who are too young to have an understanding of its purpose.”

But that’s not how the children and the majority of parents saw it.

“How many days in school are they going to remember?” asked parent Marc Lipsett, the Chronicle reported. “This is a day they’ll definitely remember.”

“[The teacher is] such a dedicated teacher,” Liz Jaroslow, interim director at the Creative Arts Charter School, told the Chronicle. “It’s certainly an issue I would be willing to put my job on the line for.”

Newsom put his career on the line for marriage equality, according to former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

“[Four years ago], I gave a fundraiser [for Barack Obama], at [Obama’s] request, at the Waterfront Restaurant,” Brown told the Chronicle last February. “And he said to me, he would really appreciate it if he didn’t get his photo taken with my mayor. He said he would really not like to have his picture taken with Gavin.”

Obama’s openly gay deputy campaign director, Steve Hildebrand, called the story “ridiculous.” But, Brown countered, “Why would I make it up?”

“I don’t know anybody in the [Democratic] party who was happy with him, except me,” Brown told the Chronicle. “He was all alone out there. He was the poster child for same-sex marriage worldwide.”

Though he is no longer alone in supporting marriage equality—Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and California Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, both possible gubernatorial rivals with Newsom, are also supportive—Newsom’s almost demonic-like representation in the anti-gay Yes on 8 campaign ad, and the fallout over his strong push advocating no on Prop. 8, may affect his political future.

“We’re taking a real honest, sober, reflective look at [running for governor in 2010], and we’ll make a decision probably in the latter part of the year,” Newsom said. “But I’m not naïve. I recognize that I’ve been identified by a number of very controversial issues and obviously the issue of marriage equality is one that I’ll never hide from, I’ll never run away from. And we’ve seen how my moment of exuberance has been exploited in the context of campaign ads. And that’s just somewhat of a preview of the kind of campaign that would be run against me if I ever did run for a statewide office. All of that needs to be factored in.”

But with a polite manner, framed by a big smile, Newsom is the political embodiment of the Tom Petty song “I Won’t Back Down.”

“There are certain fundamental principles that transcend every issue,” Newsom said, when asked about the many times the LGBT community has been told to “wait” for the appropriate time to fight for equal rights.

“This issue of equality—those are the founding principles of this country. As Dr. King said in ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ ‘Wait almost always means never.’ No. How dare we tell the gay community their lives don’t matter because our political careers are more important … I’d rather go down and end my political life trying to advance a principle than try to become something I’m not.

“Look,” Newsom said, “if you don’t have the courage to stand up on the principle of equality, are you going to have the courage to stand up to the pharmeceutical companies and the big insurance companies? I mean that sincerely. Are you going to have the courage to do what actually needs to be done on universal healthcare? I can assure you that’s a heck of a lot harder than standing up on the principle of equality. … Shame on us if our own political calculation was that other issues are more important than treating people the same. What issue is more important than that?”