After decades of demonizing gay people and blasting devotion of same-sex couples as fraudulent, Maggie Gallagher suddenly surprises everyone by announcing she thinks she has a heart…

“The suicide of that teen was not only a tragedy it was a crime. The young people who violated laws out of mindless desire to bully or embarrass or whatever the heck kids do this stuff will be prosecuted and probably jailed, I hope. Nothing in the press accounts suggest the kids who did this were motivated by homophobia, and the cruelty of cyberbullying is causing teen suicides among those who are not gay, as well. I do not think the absence of gay marriage is the cause of these tragedies or its presence will resolve them. We can make this a symbol of all our other fights, or we can try to save all our kids, gay and straight, from this kind of ugly and mindless cruelty. My heart goes out to the family of the young man. God bless him and them.” – Maggie Gallagher, commenting on NOM’s blog.

Ugly mindless cruelty?   Like this…?

“A group of San Francisco first-graders took an unusual field trip to City Hall on Friday to toss rose petals on their just-married lesbian teacher – putting the public school children at the center of a fierce election battle over the fate of same-sex marriage,” the front page story by Jill Tucker begins.

In fact, the parents who decided to surprise the beloved schoolteacher didn’t put the children “at the center of a fierce election battle” – the Chronicle did for sensationalism.

According to blogger Paul Hogarth in his Oct. 24 dissection of the piece for Beyond Chron and Daily Kos (“SF Chronicle Jeopardizes Marriage Equality”),  Tucker said that “the parents who organized the trip actively sought media coverage—and the paper decided on its own that it was ‘news’ enough to deserve front-page treatment.”

Since lesbian weddings were legal then, one can image that the parents might have expected any coverage to go in the back with the other wedding announcements. On Oct. 26 two aggrieved parents sent a letter to the Yes on 8 campaign and the Chronicle complaining about their children “being exploited and used as pawns” by the Yes campaign which downloaded the front page picture from the Chronicle’s website to use in their ads.

Sapphocrat, who blogs at LavenderLiberal, complained vociferously about the Chronicle’s failure to put the field trip into the larger context of the Creative Arts Charter School’s philosophy.

But the damage was done. In an in-depth interview with me after Prop 8 passed, campaign consultant Steve Smith said they were winning back the critical undecided women’s vote until the Yes ad featuring the Chronicle story on the lesbian teacher.

That post by Karen Ocamb centers on the roll of the San Francisco Chronicle in instigating the successful Yes On 8 attack ads which used that teacher’s wedding as a hook for their The Homos Are Invading Your Schools To Turn Your Kids Gay message.   But lurking in the background of her story is this simple, brutal fact: Maggie Gallagher and her fellow travelers in the Proposition 8 battle used the love those kids had for their teacher as a knife to cut their teacher’s ring finger off.

But she wants to save kids from mindless cruelty.   Right.   And Osama Bin Laden wants to save them from terrorist attacks.

More cartoons on The Cartoon Page…and many more in the archives I’ve been neglecting to update for so long…