One year has passed since Hawaii became the 15th state to legalize gay marriage.

The state Capitol is still standing, few are saying "we warned you," and most politicians who voted both for and against same-sex marriage are back.

The right of marriage was properly extended to men and women unfairly discriminated against when the 2013 state Legislature approved it on 11/12/13 and it was signed into law on Nov. 13.

Since then there have been reverberations.

Gov. Neil Abercrombie, for instance, says his 2-to-1 loss to state Sen. David Ige in the Democratic primary was because he called that special legislative session to legalize gay marriage.

Talking to foreign journalists during an East-West Center forum in late August, Abercrombie claimed evangelical Christian voters were "admonished by their religious leaders" to vote against him because of same-sex marriage.

That reasoning is not open and shut because Gov.-elect Ige reports that he "didn’t get the sense it was a burning issue in the Democratic primary."

Abercrombie has not yet discussed his historic loss with the Hawaii media.

If you wanted to follow the string on a gay marriage backlash theory, you would also grab on to the defeat of former state Sen. Clayton Hee, who ran for lieutenant governor.

This is a bit more tortured because one of the reasons Hee did not run for reelection to the Senate was because he had been the steersman for the same-sex marriage bill and was likely to face a loud, anti-gay Republican, former state Rep. Richard Fale.

As one of the anti-gay marriage cheerleaders during last year’s legislative session, Fale was in a perfect position to emphasize his conservative credentials with Mormon voters in Hee’s Senate district.

But Fale lost to former GOP Rep. Gil Riviere, running as a Democrat. In 2011, voting as a Republican, Riviere voted against a civil union bill.

So there are no big markers from the Hee loss.

On the Windward side, state Rep. Cynthia Thielen, a Republican and icon in the local environmental movement, had supported same-sex marriage and cast one of the important votes needed to move it out for a floor vote last year.

She was opposed by conservative Christian groups because of that move, and still won.

"My opponent made it clear that she was running against me because of my vote," Thielen said in an interview last week.

"It was a challenging and emotional time. I would hope that members would stand up and cast their vote not out of fear of the consequences, but out of knowing what is the right thing to do," Thielen said.

The other side of the coin is Kapolei Democrat Rep. Sharon Har, who opposed the civil union bill and last year’s same-sex marriage bill and helped organize opposition to its passage.

She was rewarded with a Democratic opponent in the primary to punish her for voting against the Democratic platform, and for good measure, a GOP opponent in the general.

Har won both times.

Smart, hard workers like Har and Thielen are more about representing their districts than about a single issue, even a headline- grabbing issue like same-sex marriage.

If there is a political lesson, it is that shoe leather in the district trumps spotlights and bull horns every time.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.