The recall vote on gay marriage won yesterday in Maine (53% voted for the repeal with 83% counted). This is a little discouraging but somewhat expected: polls were showing it would be close. And there is the usual line in the article:
It is currently legal in five states, but only by virtue of politicians or judges.
The US is not a direct democracy, so most of our laws are passed by politicians. It’s the way a representative democracy works. In some ways I’d like a vote in Massachusetts just to shut up all the people calling for a vote. There hasn’t been a vote, because there weren’t enough votes in the legislature, in fact in a vote only 45 out of 196 voted to have a popular vote–if you were logical you might realize that this means people in MA are ok with gay marriage, but I guess some people aren’t logical.
In any case, time is on the side of gay marriage. Let me put up these two graphs again (from here):
The first one shows the percent of people who support civil unions or gay marriage (you’ll see that it has Maine at 49%, so it’s pretty close there) and the second compares the support in 1994-6, 2003-4, and 2008-9. Using the numbers from MA is instructive: in 1994-6 the support was about 34%, in 2003-4 it was about 46%, and in 2008-9 it’s about 56% (in Maine the percents are: about 29%, 40%, and 49%). There was an increase in support in all the states, so things look good for the future.
Also, looking at the percents, I wonder why there hasn’t been a vote in Rhode Island which has the second highest support in the country (about 53%).
Petunias 