Photos of young male married couples with babies strapped to their chests and elderly women who have been together for 50 years will help diminish any threat the public may feel regarding marriages between gay people, advocates hope.
"I think the parade of couples on TV and in the newspapers and magazines is what is going to change the public attitude about marriage of same-sex couples," Davidson said. "That is what it is going to take. Before, this was an abstract issue."
The planning began over the weekend before the first gay marriages took place, as Newsom plotted strategy with top aides, several of whom are gay.
On Feb. 9, city officials called lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Those groups are now defending the city's actions, along with San Francisco's chief deputy city attorney, Therese M. Stewart, a lesbian who has long been active in equal-rights causes.
Starting some days with 6 a.m. conference calls, the lawyers worked round the clock to ready their plans.
On Thursday, Feb. 12, a day the courts were closed for the commemoration of President Lincoln's birthday, four of the five test couples were quietly ushered into City Hall to marry. Then, Newsom threw open the doors to the public.
Opponents of gay marriage have tried to keep the legal debate to a simple argument: State law does not allow same-sex weddings, and San Francisco has no right to bypass that law. They want an immediate court order blocking more marriages, but judges have put off a hearing on the issue until March 29.
"Here is my frustration," said Benjamin W. Bull, chief counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, which defends traditional religious rights. "Clearly the city's strategy is to have tens of thousands of these same-gender licenses issued so, by the time a court rules on this, it may be more of a nightmare to revoke the licenses than it will be to validate them.... Wittingly or unwittingly, the Superior Court is playing into the city's hands."
Bull said his side planned to take depositions of psychologists, sociologists and family counselors "saying that children are better off in opposite-sex relationships."
Gay rights advocates hope to get judges to focus on a different issue -- whether laws, including Proposition 22, forbidding same-sex marriages violate the California Constitution's ban on discrimination. Each of the five test couples was chosen to illuminate a different aspect of that argument.
