Newsom said he hasn’t sat down with Barney Frank, who warned the mayor to win approval in court before issuing marriage licenses, but that he had reconciled with Dianne Feinstein, who said Newsom had pushed the issue “too much, too fast, too soon.”
While he says he doesn’t like being a chew toy for Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and the religious right, or getting ugly Twitter messages or obscene gestures from people at airports, he asserts that his brazen approach in 2004 made it harder for Democrats “to speak from both sides of their mouths to justify their position that separate is equal,” and caused a “softening” in discrimination.
“People watched and saw a human face,” he said. “They saw somebody who looked like their next-door neighbor and said, ‘That’s not the person with chaps in the big gay parade.’
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