A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Bigotry in Maine
Despite the fact that same-sex marriage supporters led the campaign of their life to preserve marriage rights for gays and lesbians in Maine, the state narrowly voted to overturn a marriage equality law in yesterday's ballot. It's a bit of deja vu all over again this year, as activists still reeling over the 2008 loss in California with Proposition 8 now have to cope with a second straight loss for marriage equality, this time in Maine.
Though final tallies aren't yet set, the Yes on 1 side (the bad guys who fought to take away same-sex marriage) claimed victory with 53 percent of the vote, compared to No on 1's 47 percent. That's a heartbreaking loss, both in numbers and because by all accounts, the No on 1 campaign in Maine was one of the best organized gay rights groups around. In the closing days of the election, nearly 8,000 volunteers traveled to Maine to urge voters to keep the marriage equality law in place. They raised funds well, and they were more on top of their messaging than perhaps any effort in history to preserve same-sex marriage at the ballot box.
But in the end, 2009 proved that it's just still too soon to fight gay marriage at the ballot box, at least in many parts of the country. Maine now becomes the 31st consecutive state to lose a same-sex marriage question at the polls. Does that mean that hearts and minds aren't changing fast enough on this issue?
The real kicker in all of this is that we will win on the issue of marriage equality. It's not a question of "if," it's a question of "when." Much will be written over the coming days about why same-sex marriage supporters couldn't get over the threshold in Maine. It feels a little raw yet to pour through some of those thoughts, given that same-sex couples in Maine are waking up this morning to find out that they're now again second-class citizens in their own state.
In the immediate aftermath, it just seems that the other side -- the same folks, incidentally, who ran the successful Proposition 8 campaign in California last year -- managed to sell their bigoted propaganda effectively, and they managed to cull together millions of dollars from large groups like the National Organization for Marriage and the Catholic Church to help them peddle it.
How do we beat these anti-gay forces at the ballot box, at least when it comes to the issue of marriage? The scary truth on this post-election morning is that nobody seems to know.
Time is on our side, and the percentages are much closer on these issues than they were just three or four years ago. But that doesn't make yesterday's bitter defeat in Maine any easier to swallow.
Jesse Connolly, the leader of the No on 1 campaign, left supporters with a statement that was half a call to arms, and half a pep talk. "We're in this for the long haul," Connolly said. "For next week, and next month, and next year -- until all Maine families are treated equally. Because in the end, this has always been about love and family and that will always be something worth fighting for."
Connolly's right. And one of these times we will send the homophobes packing on Election Day. But it wasn't last night, and that's heartbreaking given how hard we all fought, and how far many of us thought the northeast had come on the issue of marriage equality.
Michael Jones
is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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