In the future, people who voted against marriage equality will lie to their grandchildren about how they voted
This is a post-election thread; feel free to discuss any of the recent election news, future election trends, etc., here.
Virginia and New Jersey: No surprises here. I don’t think these races indicate national trends, but I can’t blame Conservatives for grabbing on to any hope they can.
In the end, I think the single best thing the Democrats can do for 2010 is to get aggressive and desperate about improving the economic situation; for instance, with a big temporary cut in payroll taxes. But I doubt they’ll do it, since “gutsy” has never in my lifetime been something Democrats do well.
New York: Frankly, the Republican who was pushed out of the race — who was pro-choice and pro-marriage equality — really does seem out of step with the Republican base. For that reason, I think the Republican base in NY did the principled thing by rebelling, just as the Democratic base in Connecticut was right to rebel against being represented by Joe Lieberman.
Will this be really good for the Democrats in the end, as many Democrats are currently crowing? I don’t know.
Washington state: Huzzah for a victory on civil unions. Dammit that it was so close.
Maine
Maine should be the death of the claim that people don’t hate gays, they just hate being told what to do by the Courts. The folks who oppose equality have never cared about that, except as a pretext, so they could oppose equality while pretending not to be bigots.
The folks in Maine did everything the way they’re “supposed” to. They were polite, they were organized. They spent years building up support with face-to-face contacts. They went through the legislature, not the courts.
None of that makes any difference to the people who oppose equality. None of it ever did.
Quoting Andrew Sullivan:
The hard truth is: people are still afraid of this, and our opponents knew how to target their fears very precisely. They have honed it to an art - their prime argument now is that although adults can handle gay equality, children cannot. And so they play straight to heterosexuals whose personal comfort with gay people is fine but who sure don’t want their kids to turn out that way. One way to prevent kids turning out that way, the equality opponents argue, is to ensure that they never hear of gay people, except in a marginalized, scary, alien fashion. And this referendum was clearly a vote in which the desire to keep gay people invisible trumped the urge to treat them equally.[...]
But civil rights victories, the final and enduring ones, are always built on the foundations of defeats. Sometimes, the defeat of a minority’s sincere aspiration to equality helps reveal the injustice of the discrimination and the cruelty of the marginalization. Sometimes, it helps show just how poorly treated we are, and galvanizes a community to fight back more fiercely as we saw in that amazing march on DC last month. That has certainly been true of previous civil rights movements. It is just as true of ours.
So congrats, Maine Equality. You did a fine job. Congrats, HRC. You helped. No congrats to Obama who is treating this civil rights movement the way Kennedy first treated his. But we don’t need Obama.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. And we will win in due course, with a good spirit and keen arguments, and with passion and conviction in our hearts. We will win.



You may recall that back in June, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-You Serious?, declared that the 


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