S.F. Mayor Uniquely Able to Sanction Gay Weddings

Will you all please take “yes” for an answer?

The elected officials performing gay marriages have given some people the wrong idea about how government works.

Two gay California mayors have been hit with everything from “gentle inquiries” to nasty e-mails asking why, when “straight heroes” are issuing marriage licenses, gay mayors are being “pathetic” and “spineless” in not doing so.

An online petition drive suggests a boycott to protest the “irresponsible lack of action” in “towns that depend so heavily on our patronage.” One e-mail last Friday, misspelled and in capital letters, called West Hollywood Mayor Jeffrey Prang a “powder puff mayor” and warned, “come election day ... you are so fired!”

Well, hell-o, people ... these mayors cannot issue marriage licenses to ANYONE, gay or straight. In California, only counties -- not cities -- issue licenses.

And the reason that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom can issue marriage licenses, heterosexual or homosexual, is that, unlike anywhere else in California, San Francisco is both a city AND a county.

In his responses to the e-mails, Prang said, “I do try to educate them. If we were able to do it, if we could find any legal theory that would permit us to do it, we’d be doing it by now.”

For Palm Springs Mayor Ron Oden, “it has really just been from people who didn’t really understand the issues, and once they found out the information, I think [the hostility] has really dissipated.”

To Prang, “the real tragedy is that here’s some people aiming their guns in the wrong direction -- whatever you believe West Hollywood has or hasn’t done, we’re not the enemy.”

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GOP’s New Majority Loses a Costly Gambit

“Follow the money,” they said. This time, the trail hit a dead end.

The New Majority, rich Republican types who have become the most generous political PAC in California, were an impressive six for eight in this month’s election -- but lost the race they bankrolled the biggest.

The New Majority political action committee spent $146,000 on mail supporting Orange County Assembly candidate Cristi Cristich, who belongs to the group’s funding board. She lost to fellow GOP candidate Chuck DeVore, who got blasted in New Majority mailers as “Casino Chuck” for taking Indian gambling money. The mailers ran DeVore’s photo with one of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, a Democrat whose political pockets were filled with Indian money in the recall. DeVore denied that he had gotten tribal dough or even supported gambling at all.

Turns out someone connected some dots that weren’t there. A disclaimer on a mailer from the California Republican Assembly in support of DeVore noted, as the law required, that it had major funding from tribes -- but the money had gone to state Sen. Tom McClintock’s gubernatorial campaign, not to DeVore’s Assembly effort.

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Jones Gets Campaign Aloft in a Familiar Way

To start his honest-to-Lindbergh real barnstorming campaign for U.S. Senate against Democrat Barbara Boxer, Bill Jones flew into the Fresno airport in the plane he has campaigned in for more than a quarter-century.

Jones wasn’t piloting when he joined President Bush aboard Air Force One for a couple of short campaign hops in California. Jones believes the state is “in play for the president.... I’m not telling you he made a commitment that he’s going to win California. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that I believe he can, and he spent adequate time with me to imply that he was interested in doing that.”

(Jones got his knuckles whacked four years ago when he endorsed Bush, then switched his allegiance to Sen. John McCain, and jumped back to Bush when McCain didn’t win the California primary.)

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Points Taken

* It never stops, does it? The primary election for state treasurer is a year away, and already former gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon Jr. and Assemblyman Keith Richman, Republicans both, will likely be running against each other for the nomination.

* Rosario Marin, who lost the GOP Senate nomination to Bill Jones, used to work with Jones strategist Sean Walsh in their days together during the Pete Wilson administration. Back then, Walsh gave Marin pictures of his children, which, This Space has learned, she still carries, along with snaps of her own kids and those given to her by parents of disabled kids. (Marin’s son has Down syndrome.) She carried them with her throughout the sometimes sharp-edged primary campaign against Jones -- “all the more reason,” she remarked, “to keep them with me always and hold them close.”

* Bruce Hershensohn, a Pepperdine University prof and former GOP Senate candidate, has published “Passport,” an 896-page novel of political intrigue chronicling the varied fortunes of a dozen characters through nearly four decades of international upheavals from Hong Kong to Iran.

* Carole Migden, who heads the state Board of Equalization and who just won the Democratic nomination for state Senate in a slam-dunk liberal Bay Area district, has family competition. Her sister, Janine, has been appointed consumers’ counsel for the state of Ohio.

* Martin Valdez was running for San Bernardino County supervisor in a big-time Latino district, and slipped into his mailer a recipe for chile verde with chicharrones. The way to voters’ hearts must not be through their stomachs -- Valdez lost, with 10% of the vote.

* Harper’s magazine says San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom gave $500 to George Bush’s presidential campaign in 2000 -- against the thousands that he has given to Democratic candidates and causes. So, say it ain’t so? OK, it ain’t so, says a Newsom spokesman -- “Not true.”

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You Can Quote Me

“It is ‘The Brady Bunch.’ ”

Los Angeles City Councilman Martin Ludlow, speaking of his new menage after his marriage Saturday to Kimberly Blake, author of an advice book for teenage girls. They wed seven years after they met at the West Los Angeles Church of God in Christ, where Blake’s father presides. It took Ludlow six years to ask her out. They will share a house with Ludlow’s three children and Blake’s two -- hence the Brady reference.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. This week’s contributors include Times staff writers Michael Finnegan, Jessica Garrison, Hugo Martin and Jean O. Pasco.