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parse public opinion, you find the acceptance of gay
marriage is not just growing; it is accelerating. This is
driven, of course, by the overwhelming support of
young voters, but also by white Catholics, who have
grown more open­-minded on gay rights as they have
become more affluent and educated, and as their
children return from college with more liberal attitudes.
Adding to the inexorability is a factor pollsters refer to
as “salience,” a measure of how much an issue means
to you. It figures heavily in what politicians decide is
safe to do. Most Americans favor restrictions on guns,
for example, but gun control is stymied by salience: the
people who want full gun rights care far more about
the issue than those who oppose them. Opponents of
gay marriage used to hold their opinion more
passionately than supporters. But as more Americans
have openly gay children, siblings, friends and
neighbors, the supporters feel just as strongly. Another
sign of seismic change: civil unions, once regarded by
gay­-marriage supporters as a best­-we­-can­-hope­-for
compromise, have become a fallback position of the
anti­-marriage camp.
African­-American support for gay marriage has
remained stubborn, hovering around 30 percent for
years, for reasons of class and education and because
of the centrality of church in their lives. According to
internal memos of the National Organization for
Marriage, the anti­-gay­-marriage lobby sees an
opportunity to play on the fact that some blacks resent
hearing gay marriage likened to their own civil rights
struggle.
Fortunately for Grisanti, black congregations will not
have much of a chance to register their disapproval in
November. The legislators who have designed a
statewide redistricting plan took extraordinary pains to
protect Grisanti by sculpturing him a friendlier district.
The redrawn district cuts Grisanti’s black constituency
to 5 percent from 37 percent and reduces the
Democrat­-to­-Republican ratio to less than two to one.
To accomplish this, the designers took two distant
swatches of friendly territory and attached them by a
long thin strand of Lake Erie shoreline where the only
constituents are fish.
Indeed, Grisanti and the other three are in the
improbable position of having grateful support both
from the state G.O.P. leaders and from the Democratic
governor. Cuomo, whose popularity is high, has
lavished praise on the Republican Four for their
courage. And Republican leaders are delighted that
gay donors — who might, in the wake of a defeat,
have mounted jihad against the state’s Republicans —
are instead contributing generously to save these four
Republican seats. Each raised between $400,000 and
The New York Times/ ­- Politics, Sáb, 14 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
$540,000 in the 10 months after the vote, mighty war
chests for State Senate races. Discreetly, because
local party officials resent being leaned on, state
Republican leaders have tried to wave off strong
challengers from filing in the Republican primaries of
the four defectors.
Bill Keller is a former executive editor of The Times. He
writes a column for the Op­-Ed page.
EDITOR: Greg Veis
Daisies Cafe sits on a block of Lackawanna between
the baroque immensity of Our Lady of Victory basilica
and the storefront office of the Erie County
Conservative Party. It is home to something called the
“Lard­-ass Omelet” (which contains “every single meat
we serve,” a waitress explained) and to a Saturday
political breakfast that has been going on for 13 years.
It draws Buffalo pols from all parties but is long on
Conservatives.The Saturday I arrived, the county
Conservative Party had just voted to deny Grisanti the
party’s ballot line this year in favor of a conservative
(and anti­-gay­-marriage) Democrat. A month earlier the
Erie County Conservative chairman, Ralph Lorigo, laid
out for me a pretty convincing case for forgiving
Grisanti. The senator is pro­-gun, anti­-abortion,
pro­-business on taxes and regulation, a champion of
charter schools — a budding star by most
Conservative measures. And importantly, Grisanti’s
victory gave the Republicans their single­-member
margin of control in the Senate, making it a far more
congenial environment for issues that matter to
Conservatives. Why put that at risk for a little payback
on gay marriage?
Around the long table at Daisies, that sort of
pragmatism could no longer be found. The
gay­-marriage issue had now been rebranded as an
“integrity issue.” It wasn’t so much that Grisanti had
voted for marriage, the breakfasting pols said. It’s that
when he changed his mind he should have announced
that to voters and then submitted himself to another
election before casting such an important vote.
The rebranding suggested to me that the anti­-marriage
camp is aware of its salience problem. Lashing
Grisanti for a vote of conscience could be
counterproductive, so the hunt is under way for
nonmarriage reasons to dump him. One that may get
some mileage is the senator’s recent involvement in a
bar brawl at an Indian­-owned casino in his district.
According to Grisanti’s account, he went to watch his
daughter fill in for the lead singer of a Rat Pack­-era
cover band called the Scintas. While waiting in the bar,
he tried to verbally defuse an argument between two
drinkers; before he knew it fists were flying, someone
had knocked his wife to the floor and he was wading in
to save her. The district attorney has chosen to close
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