E-Mail This Article to a Friend FOR THE RECORD A vote of confidence for gay-marriage allies BY DEIRDRE FULTON

Supporting gay marriage appears not to have hurt state legislators who ran for re-election in November, according to a new study by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Election results from five Midwestern battleground states (Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin) where representatives and senators had the chance to vote on anti-gay-marriage amendments before the election, showed that while 19 out of the 215 legislators who voted for such amendments lost their seats, only three out of the 103 who opposed them were out of a job.

"This shows that for most voters, whether or not gay couples can marry isn’t going to affect the way they vote," explains Sean Cahill, director of the task force’s policy institute. "If anything, standing up for equality may actually help incumbents."

These results seem to complicate, if not contradict, the widespread post-election claims that the gay-marriage issue hurt Democrats in general and John Kerry in particular. The report was commissioned by Minnesota state senator D. Scott Dibble specifically to combat such backlash, as he felt support for gay marriage was waning in the wake of the election. That state, along with more than 10 others, will reconsider an amendment banning gay marriage this year or in 2006.

Here in Massachusetts, election results followed a similar trend. All incumbent state legislators who supported gay-marriage rights were re-elected (pro-gay-marriage candidates also won six of eight open seats). Two anti-gay-marriage incumbents, Representatives Vincent Ciampa and Mark Howland, were defeated in September primaries. And, MassEquality campaign director Marty Rouse points out, the incumbent legislators who had the toughest races — regardless of whether they won or lost — were those who opposed gay marriage.

All this bodes well for pro-gay-marriage candidates preparing to run in special elections to fill three seats left open by the departures of House Speaker Thomas Finneran, State Senator Brian Golden, and State Representative Peter Larkin. At the very least, it shows that their records will be scrutinized beyond their stance on a single issue.