Despite predictions that same-sex marriage could turn the November election (the same way that conventional wisdom holds that it did in 2004), as Ben Adler wrote in The New Republic recently, “All in all, gay marriage policies, including not only anti-marriage referenda but also the New Jersey Supreme Court’s pro-gay marriage decision, proved to be an electoral dog that didn’t bark this year.”

The New Jersey Supreme Court issued a ruling on October 25 that homosexual couples are entitled to the same legal rights as heterosexual couples, and the dominant prediction was that, as a New York Times article put it, “the low-key tenor of the same-sex marriage debate could change in a thunderclap if a court decision that appears to undermine traditional marriage boundaries is handed down before the election.”

Seven states passed the same-sex bans on their ballots this year. The states that passed them were Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Idaho, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. According to the Initiative and Referendum Institute, that brings the total number of states that have approved same-sex marriage bans (most of the time with other restrictions added) to 23.

An unusual wrinkle to this story is that in Arizona, where Proposition 107 was supported by politicians as prominent as John McCain, the same-sex marriage ban failed at the ballot by 52% to 48%, largely because the ban would have also denied benefits to same-sex couples. In addition to passing Amendment 43, a same-sex marriage ban, Colorado voters rejected Referendum I, which would have extended to same-sex couples the same rights and benefits that apply to heterosexual marriages. Referendum I lost by a margin of 52% to 47%.

It’s unclear how much of an impact the New Jersey Supreme Court ruling had on voters in the states that had ballot measures banning same-sex marriage, but the election results generally were a demonstration that, at the very least, same-sex marriage was not a defining issue of the 2006 election cycle, nor was it even close to being a defining issue.

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