William J. "Pete" Knight, a former Air Force test pilot who as a Republican state senator led the charge against gay marriage in California with a successful statewide initiative in 2000, has died. He was 74.
Knight, who has been absent from his seat since April 12 because of leukemia, died Friday night of an acute form of the cancer at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte.
At the time of his death, Knight was completing his final months as the GOP state senator from the Palmdale area. He was unable to run for another term because of term limits.
Knight was best known as the author of Proposition 22, the California ballot initiative defining marriage as strictly between a man and a woman. The initiative was approved by more than 60% of voters and presaged the state's current fight over the legality of gay marriage.
It also created a painful rift between Knight and his son, David Knight, who publicly announced that he is gay.
When San Francisco officials briefly issued marriage licenses to gay couples earlier this year, the elder Knight fought the city's efforts in court. Meanwhile, his estranged son traveled from his home in Baltimore to marry his partner in San Francisco's City Hall.
"I love my father dearly and I miss him," David Knight told The Times in March. "But if he's going to continue to attack something that affects me and affects my friends, and do something that I believe is wrong, I can't just not try to make my own statement."
Asked Saturday whether he had reconciled with his father before the senator's death, a clearly grieving David Knight said, "I really just have no input. I am not able to talk just now."
David Orosco, the senator's communications director who announced Knight's death, said Saturday that the father and son had spoken during the past three weeks and that he thought "David also saw his father."
To social conservatives, Pete Knight was a hero.
"He just has a very strong view of right and wrong, and it's all kind of wrapped up in being a true, patriotic American," George Runner, a former Republican assemblyman who is running for Knight's seat, said recently.
Knight was born Nov. 18, 1929, in Noblesville, Ind. As a slightly built young man, he worked as a racehorse jockey. The love of speed he developed at the track persuaded him to try his hand as a pilot, according to Andrew Pugno, lawyer for the Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund and a former Knight aide.
