William J. “Pete” Knight, a California state senator who authored a controversial gay marriage ban, died on May 7 of leukemia. He was 74.
Born in Noblesville, Ind., Knight attended Butler and Purdue Universities. He enlisted in the United States Air Force, earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology and graduated from the Air Force’s Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base.
During his 32-year tenure in the military, Knight flew and tested more than 100 types of planes. He made history in 1967 by flying an experimental X-15 aircraft at 6.7 times the speed of sound. After achieving the fastest manned airplane voyage in history, Knight earned his astronaut wings for another X-15 flight that reached 280,000 feet in altitude. By the time he retired as a colonel in 1982, he had flown 253 combat missions in Southeast Asia and received numerous commendations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Legion of Merit.
In 1984, Knight was elected to the city council in Palmdale, Calif. He became Palmdale’s mayor in 1988 and was elected to the California Assembly four years later. The Republican then set his sights on the state Senate. He was elected in 1996, and represented the 17th Senate District until April, when he was forced to take a medical leave of absence.
While serving in public office, the staunch conservative authored legislation that ordered welfare recipients to undergo abstinence-only sex education, required children in every California elementary and secondary school to recite the Pledge of Allegiance on a daily basis and commanded handgun owners seeking concealed firearm permits to obtain a handgun safety certificate. He gained notoriety in 1993 for distributing a poem to legislative colleagues that characterized illegal immigrants from Mexico as lazy and greedy. But Knight was best known as the author of the state’s Defense of Marriage Act, which said that only marriages between a man and a woman should be recognized as valid in California.
After failing to get this piece of legislation through the Democrat-controlled Legislature, Knight took the issue to the voters in 2000. Proposition 22 passed by 61.4 percent, and is currently being tested in several courts. Although he was a vocal opponent of nontraditional marriages, Knight’s son David married his long-time partner, Joseph Lazzaro, when San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples earlier this year.
Knight was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame. A new high school in Palmdale, Calif., is named in his honor.
Pete Knight
Categories: Military, Politicians