O.C. Preacher Pledges New Anti-Gay Drives : Gay Rights: The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon says he will turn his energies to the public schools.

The Orange County preacher who successfully supported ballot measures against gay rights in three California cities, including Irvine, vowed Wednesday to pursue additional campaigns to curb homosexual rights.

“To give special rights to an insular distinct minority is pushing voters too far,” said the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, leader of the Anaheim based-Traditional Values Coalition. “(People) are saying, ‘Enough is enough. . . .’ ”

Tuesday’s 53% to 47% approval of Irvine’s Measure N, which repealed protections for gays from the city’s 15-month-old broad anti-discrimination law, was one of three important defeats for gay rights issues in California Tuesday.

In Concord, east of San Francisco, voters repealed an ordinance barring discrimination against people with AIDS. And in perhaps the most surprising result, voters in San Francisco, by reputation the most tolerant of American cities, narrowly rejected a law that would have permitted unmarried “domestic partners” to register their relationships at City Hall.

Sheldon, who opposed gays in all three campaigns, made his comments at a news conference in Anaheim, where he basked in victory and pledged to take his crusade to California’s schools. He said he will approach school districts throughout the state, beginning in Orange County, to make sure that teachers do not encourage homosexuality.

The election results, Sheldon declared, put politicians throughout the state on notice that voters do not believe that gays and lesbians deserve the same protection given to women and minority groups.

There were common threads in Tuesday’s results. All three measures had been approved by local governments--and all three were placed on the ballot by petition drives organized by fundamentalist Christians supported by Sheldon.

Advocates of gay rights were stunned by their electoral shutout but rejected any sweeping conclusions about the future of the gay movement.

“It is a sad and depressing day,” said Carol Anderon, co-president of Lawyers for Human Rights in Los Angeles. She blamed “complacency” among gay voters following three statewide electoral victories over repressive AIDS initiatives.

Robert Bray, communications director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, noted that the setbacks in California came the same week that the Massachusetts Legislature approved civil rights protections for gay men and lesbians in a bill that Gov. Michael S. Dukakis has pledged to sign.

Irvine’s approval of Measure N by 11,482 votes to 10,328 removes the words sexual orientation from the city’s human rights ordinance, which continues to ban discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age or physical handicap in housing, employment and public services.

The mandate could signal trouble for Mayor Larry Agran and council members Cameron Cosgrove and Edward A. Dornan, who were vocally opposed to the initiative and who face reelection next June.

“This is a black eye on Agran and the rest of the council,” said Michael Shea, one of the leaders of the Irvine Values Coalition, which led the charge for Measure N. He pledged to support candidates who have “pro-family” views in the next election.

But Agran said he doubted that passage of the measure would hurt him politically because the vote was close.

“I think it is an issue people have decided early-on. Arguments have been passed back and forth, and the voters in Irvine have made up their mind and are very independent,” Agran said Wednesday.

Sheldon, who advocates that gays and lesbians should receive special therapy to change their “sexual behavior,” said he helped the measure’s proponents plan their campaign strategy.

The Irvine Values Coalition focused on portraying homosexuals as child molesters and “recruiters” to the gay community in the Yes-on-N campaign.

Gay rights advocates, however, accused the Irvine traditional values group of pursuing a “vile,” negative campaign that they said confused voters.

“The passage of Measure N was not, as our opponents have claimed, a victory for family values. It was a victory for intolerance,” said the Rev. Fred Plumer, a member of Citizens United, the group opposing the measure. “It was a victory for fear and hatred and a temporary setback for compassion and human concern.”

Agran said he does not plan to try to push for another measure or city action to reinstate the section of the ordinance. Under Measure N, that would be a more difficult task because voter approval is now needed for reinstatement of gay rights.

Councilwoman Sally Anne Sheridan, who voted for the ordinance in 1988 but who was the sole council member to declare neutrality on the initiative, said the Measure N victory could spell future defeats for Agran.

“People voted against Larry, rather than the issue,” said Sheridan, who has formed an exploratory committee for her own campaign for mayor.

Virginia Uribe, a lesbian teacher who started Project 10 at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, the country’s first support group for gay students within a school, predicted that Sheldon will eventually spread himself too thin on too many issues he opposes.

“The more vocal and discriminatory these people get, the more people are willing to work harder to fight him. He is a very vocal person who stirs up inflammatory rhetoric,” Uribe said.

In San Francisco, as gays assessed damage to their cause Wednesday, businessman Jack Bellingham said he was “serving notice that there is an entity as strong as or stronger than the gay voting block in San Francisco: conservatives and religious people who believe in traditional family values.”

The Domestic Partners law, which was unanimously approved by the Board of Supervisors earlier this year and signed by Mayor Art Agnos, was defeated by a razor-thin margin of fewer than 2,000 votes, 50.5% to 49.5%.

Agnos vowed to “come back again and again” with similar legislation. Harry Britt, the city’s openly gay president of the Board of Supervisors and the measure’s principal sponsor, said it is “a false perception” that gay power is waning in the city.

Dick Pabich, the political consultant who engineered the campaign in favor of the law, blamed relatively low voter turnout in an off-year election for the defeat.

The repeal of the AIDS bias ordinance in Concord by a margin of 56% to 44% surprised local public health officials. It was the the first such referendum in the nation.

“It’s a hard lesson when fear and hate prevail, but I’m afraid that’s the lesson we’ve learned,” said Francie Wise, director of communicable disease control for Contra Costa County.

She noted that everyone from President Bush to former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop had embraced civil rights protection for people with AIDS and those infected with the human immunodeficiency virus.

The Rev. Lloyd Mashore, who helped lead the repeal campaign and rode it to a seat on Concord’s council, had attacked the law as “a homosexual agenda presented in camouflaged, palatable anti-discrimination language.”

Eng reported from Orange County and Zonana from San Francisco. Times staff writer Mark I. Pinsky also contributed to this story from Orange County.