Don't blame Gavin

It seems that San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome is being offered as the sacrificial offering to the Democrat masses for the failure of the Kerry/Edwards ticket to capture the White House. According to the points-of-view I've seen offered up for the past few days, the near mythic power of the Evangelical was a dormant beast until Newsome decided to allow a few gay marriages.

As this theory apparently runs, the Evangelicals (which makes up about 59 million American voters if you listen to the way the mainstream media spin) felt that the Decline And Fall Of Civilization As We Know It would occur if Bruce and Steve were allowed to place rings on each other's fingers and say "I do."

To hear the media spin it, this barbaric act of exchanging rings was so outrageous that the so-called "morals voters" turned out in droves to reject this travesty of God's Law, and thus projected George W.Bush to the White House based upon their own bigotry and hatred of gays.

Maybe I'm not the typicalBushvoter, but that isn't what I was feeling on the way to the polls Tuesday morning.

Along with about 60% of America, I'm fine with Bruce and Steve having some form of legal and moral contract dedicating their lives to each other. My moral issues went a bit deeper than whether or not each household was composed of an equal number of adults preferring the toilet seat up or down.

My moral issues began with courage, conviction, integrity, and resolve, not gay marriage, or whether or not you beleive in God the same way that I do, or even if you believe in God at all. I found that for me, George W. Bush better exhibited these qualities of leadership better than John Kerry did, almost across the board.

Why?

We've had almost four years to judge George W. Bush in what fate shaped into a remarkable presidential term. To find a true position of leadership in John Kerry's life we have to go back over 30 years to four months in Vietnam, where his superiors and peers gave him less than stellar marks for his performance. These were the moral issues that troubled me, and the majority of American voters.

You see, we aren't just a bunch of bible-thumping rednecks. We have much more depth than the ineffectual intellectuals in the media would like you to believe. Gavin Newsome is just a whipping boy, an excuse. His opinion didn't affect the election in any appreciable way, despite what the media would have you beleive.

Call me crazy, but if you really want to find someone to blame for John Kerry's defeat, I think you might want to start with John Kerry.