The campaign against same-sex marriage in California was treading water until it got help from an unexpected corner: a Republican mayor choking up and announcing he would not betray his gay daughter.
San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders had promised to oppose same-sex marriage. Then, last fall, hours before he was supposed to veto a City Council motion supporting gay marriage, he called a news conference at which he broke into tears.
One of his daughters is gay, he said, and he just couldn't tell her she did not have the right to get married.
The about-face stunned political observers and energized opponents of same-sex marriage who felt Sanders had betrayed them. It was only one of the twists on the path to the November ballot for Proposition 8, which, if passed, would amend the state constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman. Other milestones included a significant boost from ministers and an assist from an out-of-state conservative group that sent an operative to San Diego to raise money.
"It's not how things typically get on the ballot," Democratic political strategist Darry Sragow said.
Opponents of same-sex marriage say they began preparing for the amendment campaign not long after San Francisco issued the nation's first same-sex marriage licenses in February 2004.
During the so-called Winter of Love, officials in San Francisco married more than 4,000 gay and lesbian couples, prompting euphoria and outrage nationwide. Mayor Gavin Newsom said the California Constitution gave him the right to perform the marriages. The state Supreme Court disagreed and invalidated them because of Proposition 22, the 2000 ballot initiative that defined marriage as between a man and a woman, and other marriage laws that have long been on the state's books.
Gay rights activists decided to challenge the constitutionality of the state's marriage laws.
Opponents of gay marriage, meanwhile, decided California needed a constitutional amendment that would put the matter out of judges' reach, according to Andrew Pugno, a legal advisor to the Protect Marriage coalition. The coalition, which has its office in Sacramento, is made up of churches and self-described pro-family organizations and leaders across the state.
Until 2007, efforts to put an amendment on the ballot faltered.
It was hard to get people excited about a threat as abstract as the possibility that the Supreme Court might rule against Proposition 22, Pugno said, and opponents of same-sex marriage were split into factions.
