c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Margaret Marshall, it seems, was the Elian Gonzalez of the 2004 election.

Elian, you may recall, came floating out of nowhere _ actually, out of the Florida Straits _ and landed in the 2000 campaign. His forcible return to his father in Cuba cost Al Gore more than enough Cuban-American votes in Florida to cause Gore to grow a beard instead of a Rose Garden.

At about the same time in this year’s election cycle, Marshall _ chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court _ wrote a 4-3 decision ordering the start of gay marriage in the Democratic presidential candidate’s home state. More than a dozen state initiatives later _ from Oklahoma to Oregon to, yes, Ohio _ it seems that the gay marriage issue helped galvanize the kind of massive religious conservative turnout that George Bush’s political mastermind Karl Rove always envisioned as the core of the re-election effort.

“George Bush can credit his re-election to the homosexual activists who pushed for (gay marriage) in the courts,” Carrie Gordon Earll, a spokesman for the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, told the Denver Post. “Most certainly this is something that is galvanizing the church.”

Across the partisan line, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told the San Francisco Chronicle: “I believe it did energize a very conservative vote. It gave them a position to rally around. The whole issue has been too much, too fast, too soon.”

And among the huge new Hispanic turnout that Democrats congratulated themselves on producing Tuesday, a large hunk voted for Bush _ largely on gay marriage.

John Kerry, of course, told everyone who would listen that he was actually against gay marriage _ but then, Gore also said he was against sending Elian back to Cuba, and that didn’t help Gore, either.

And now, the buzzword coming out of this election is “moral values,” identified by Bush voters in exit polls as their top motivation.

“Moral values” is not just a set of positions, but also a language, and a language that Democrats often don’t speak that well.

“There is no question in my mind that we as a party speak too much in programs and policy, rather than in value terms,” said Mark Mellman, Kerry’s pollster, Thursday. Mellman argued that Kerry’s acceptance speech had talked values, but “that was a theme we lost as we moved through the campaign.”

Yet Democrats who win _ and OK, it’s a diminishing list _ can speak values as well as policy. That includes Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and lately, Illinois Sen.-elect Barack Obama. That last listing isn’t getting years ahead of ourselves; it’s just a recognition that a statement Obama made at the Democratic convention _ “We in the blue states worship an awesome God” _ is the kind of declaration that Democrats should put on banners.

But “moral values” is not only a language. It can also be a code word.

Among the GOP’s “moral values” speakers are a senator-elect from South Carolina who thinks gays shouldn’t teach in public schools; another from Oklahoma who warned that Southeast Oklahoma high schools were so overrun by lesbians that students could only go to bathrooms alone; and a re-elected senator from Kentucky whose supporter, the state Senate president, attacked the Democratic candidate as “limp-wristed.”

Just what values do you want to talk about?

Wednesday, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay boasted, “We’re going to lead this country in the direction we’ve been dreaming of for years. … We’re going to put God back in the public square.”

That’s the kind of overreaching that leads to a fall _ theologically and otherwise.

As the exit polls show, there are indeed millions of voters out there who want a candidate to be comfortable talking in religious and moral terms, talking about right and wrong as well as deficits and surpluses.

But there are other millions, and maybe many more millions, who don’t see God as red or blue _ or as a weapon. And when politicians _ especially Democratic politicians _ work on talking in moral language, they also need to talk to, and for, those voters.

Or sometime they’ll come floating out of nowhere.

(David Sarasohn is an associate editor of The Oregonian in Portland, Ore.)

MO/PH END SARASOHN