The Second Class Citizen

We're going to lose Maine. I'm writing this at 1030 at night, watching the results come in, and it looks bad. We're going to go down by the same margin of 52-48 that went down in California. And this time, how do we explain it?

I am a second class citizen. I do not deserve equal rights in the eyes of my government, and Maine was supposed to change things, for some reason. Here is a relatively independent minded people who could have been the first people to assume that just because I'm gay doesn't mean that I deserve lesser rights.

I wanted this to be a different result, because I wanted us to gain a state by popular assent, not by the force of the judiciary or of the legislature. All the mechanisms by which I have to ask for rights that should be mine without the request are slow. Sure, five states will be a HELL of a lot better than the one we had at the beginning of the year. But we lost California a year ago, and now we're losing Maine. This isn't Mississippi or Alabama, states where people by and large are bigoted. This is Maine.

I think this result is going to set us back by 5 years, at the least.

And where do we turn now? Sure, DC will legalize by the end of the year. New York has a bill that will die because of the inadequacies of their senate. No other states have serious legislative agendas planned on the issue, and no court is going to act on our behalf at this point--mainly because no courts are hearing the issue. The only hope we have for a change is if the US Supreme Court accepts Massachusetts v. USA on DOMA and has DOMA overturned. Then, there's no point in maintaining constitutional amendments banning same sex marriage, because it can only ban those performed in the state, and with DOMA suspended, it means that I can go get married in Massachusetts or Iowa or wherever, and Colorado MUST accept my marriage as valid.

Right now, I really don't like the Catholic Church.