Source: Bangor News, Associated Press, Portland Press Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times
“Devastating” is an adjective often used in press articles to describe the results of Maine’s vote on Question 1 Tuesday that denies marriage rights to the state’s gay and lesbian couples.
Vote totals from the opposite side of the country were only slightly more hopeful. With Referendum 71, voters in Washington weighed in on a law that grants the rights and responsibilities of marriage to lesbian and gay couples, but specifically denies them the use of the term “marriage”.
The Washington referendum appears to have passed, based on still-incomplete results from the state’s mail-only voting system, but it could garner support from only a slim majority of voters. (The approval rate is likely to grow, however, because an estimated 129,000 remain to be counted in King County where over 66 percent of voters so far have approved the measure.)
The vote on Question 1 in Maine was personally devastating for gay and lesbian couples there.
“I’m very sad about that,” said Kay Wilkins, 69, a volunteer for the marriage equality campaign.
Wilkins and her partner of 21 years, Diana Kate, had been hoping to have a wedding as soon as the now-repealed law took effect, Bangor News reports. But she said Wednesday that she doubts that will be possible now. “As we are an older couple, I really begin to wonder whether it is going to happen in our lifetimes,” she told the News.
Mary Bonauto, a lawyer and LGBT advocate who helped run No on 1: Protect Maine Equality campaign, said many people are hurting, including couples who have spent decades in committed same-sex relationships.
“Here we are in a civil-rights struggle. And what do we do in civil rights struggles? We pick ourselves up and we stay the course,” Bonauto told Portland Press Herald.
At a Wednesday rally on the steps of the Portland city hall, about 200 supporters of marriage equality gathered to share hugs and tears, the Press Herald reports.
“Are we disappointed? Yes. We feel deeply what happened to us last night,” said Pat Peard, a longtime champion of LGBT rights.
Advocates and couples try to make sense of Tuesday’s ‘devastating’ vote results [contd.]
By contrast, the mood among the crowd was hopeful and sometimes ebullient Tuesday evening among the hundreds who gathered at a Portland, Maine hotel ballroom to participate in what they had every reason to expect would be a victory party for marriage equality.
It wasn’t.
San Francisco Chronicle writer Joe Garofoli explains why there was such optimism in Portland as Tuesday’s vote count started:
The politically moderate state with a “live and let live” ethos is surrounded by New England neighbors that had already approved gay nuptials. Even the top strategist of the referendum campaign admitted after the polls closed Tuesday that same-sex marriage advocates ran a superior field organization in Maine.
But the votes were not there. Still, some advocates for same-sex marriages pointed Wednesday to the progress the issue has made in a short time. In 2004, voters approved constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in 13 states by an average of 70 percent, Simon said.
In an analysis of the vote, Associated Press National Writer David Crary puts it this way:
The stars seemed aligned for supporters of gay marriage. They had Maine's governor, legislative leaders and major newspapers on their side, plus a huge edge in campaign funding. So losing a landmark referendum was a devastating blow, for activists in Maine and nationwide.
Bangor News explains that huge edge in funding and in organizing that the No on 1: Protect Maine Equality campaign enjoyed:
According to the last campaign finance report, filed two weeks before the election, the No campaign had raised $4 million versus $2.5 million for the Yes campaign. No on 1 also had a network of an estimated 8,000 volunteers — far more than the Yes side.
But despite the advantages enjoyed by the marriage equality campaign, 53 percent of the state’s voters chose to strip from gay and lesbian couples the right to marry.
Even though Mainers from both urban and rural counties had voted in 2005 to maintain the state’s law that prohibits discrimination against LGBT people, the state’s rural residents were not convinced this year by the messages from the No On 1 campaign.
Bangor News reporter Kevin Miller explains the sharp divide in the vote returns:
Rural Maine voted heavily to overturn Maine’s law allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed.
In the most extreme example, 73 percent of the nearly 27,000 Aroostook County voters who cast ballots voted “yes” on Question 1. Roughly two-thirds of voters in Piscataquis, Somerset, and Washington counties also favored repeal.
The opposite was true in many of Maine’s more populated areas.
In Cumberland County, 60 percent of voters opposed the repeal and in Portland, Maine’s largest city, that figure swelled to 73.5 percent. Roughly 54 percent of voters in Bangor and Scarborough cast votes against the repeal of the same-sex marriage law.
Gay marriage also had strong support in college towns, picking up 73 percent of voters in Orono and 63 percent in Brunswick.
One notable exception to the rural-urban divide was in the heavily Roman Catholic and Franco-American neighborhoods of Lewiston and Auburn, where 59 percent and 54 percent of voters, respectively, favored the repeal.
A similar divide was seen in Washington in votes on Referendum 71, Seattle Times reports:
The measure was capturing enough votes in 10 of the state's most populous counties to overcome rejection in the other 29, swaths that remain largely unfamiliar terrain to the gay-rights movement. They are Republican strongholds, counties with large numbers of blue-collar workers — and where opponents of Ref. 71 in recent weeks have staked new, strong claims.
Josh Friedes, campaign manager for Washington Families Standing Together, which worked to uphold the partnership law, said gaining ground in those parts of the state is a slow, steady process.
“The fact that we lost in many of those counties doesn't mean that we didn't improve our numbers or that people there are not thinking about this,” he said.
“For many, this is a serious matter; it’s about family and marriage and for many, religion. I think it takes time for people to move on this issue.”
Anti-gay campaigners, on the other hand, were ebullient over their victory in Maine. Some of them have even mentioned the possibility of going back to the polls with a constitutional amendment to enshrine discrimination in the state’s constitution. “It’s more important to see what the other side is going to do,” Bob Emrich, a Baptist pastor from who was a leader of the anti-equality campaign told Bangor News.
Emrich warned that he and other anti-gay activists would propose a discrimination amendment if further attempts are made to assure equal rights for LGBT Mainers. “If the other side continues to bring it up, then we might need to do that,” He said. But the leader of an anti-gay campaign whose ads were designed to inflame emotion added, “I think the emotions have to settle.”
LGBT and marriage equality activists, for their part, tried to take heart in the fact that it wasn’t a blowout loss in Maine. “This was not a landslide for the vote against marriage equality,” said Suzanne Goldberg, a professor specializing in sexuality and gender law at Columbia Law School in New York. “I suspect, going forward, that we are on the verge of being at the tipping point.”
Referendum 71 in Washington asked voters to approve or reject a law that gives a wide range of rights and responsibilities to gay and lesbian couples, but specifically denies them the right to the term “marriage”.
The anti-gay campaign in Washington sought to strip domestic partnership rights that specifically exclude use of the term “marriage”. The anti-right campaign was launched in the state by right wing activists even though anti-gay campaigners in Maine and in California last year during the Proposition 8 campaign have insisted they were concerned only about the “institution” of “marriage” and do not object to rights that don’t include use of the term.
Pre-election polls had shown significant support for the rights, but the election has proved to be far closer than the polls suggested.
The campaign to maintain the expanded partnership law declared victory Wednesday, even as votes from the state’s mail-only balloting system continue to be counted. But the apparent victory was won by a tiny margin. As of Wednesday evening’s count, only 51.65 percent of the state’s voters supported the partnership rights.
The out gay state senator who has spearheaded Washington’s measured legislative process of embracing the partnership rights warned Wednesday that the vote demonstrate that “we still have a lot of work to do in having a conversation with the citizens of the state about the reality of gay and lesbian families.”
The votes in both Maine and Washington could eventually have an affect in California where activists hope to revisit the issue of marriage equality with a new ballot measure that would remove the discrimination amendment added to the constitution by Prop. 8. But activists in California remain bitterly divided over timing for the initiative.
Some activists, including a coalition called Restore Equality 2010, hope to put the issue to the voters during next year’s congressional and gubernatorial election. “One of the advantages of going on the ballot is that we can create our own messaging,” one of the group’s organizers, Chaz Lowe, told the Chronicle’s Garofoli.
Others, including Equality California, are convinced that voters would be more likely to approve marriage equality if the measure appears on the 2012 presidential election ballot.
Garofoli writes:
The defeat in Maine gave more ammunition to Californians who want to return same-sex marriage to the ballot in 2012 - a presidential election year when more young voters, who tend to support such unions, are expected to turn out.
While little exit polling was done in Maine, the number of young voters who cast ballots in Virginia and New Jersey dropped precipitously from a year ago in widely watched gubernatorial races in those states.
Still, it seems that lessons from Tuesday’s votes – whatever they may be – have yet to completely sink in for activists in California or elsewhere.
Restore Equality announced yesterday that it will go ahead with a campaign to raise funds for a 2010 initiative.
On the group’s website, Lowe is quoted:
“We cannot let the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and its allies, who are willing to spend millions of dollars, defy campaign laws and twist the truth, to deny us our rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution – equal protection under the law.”
But some other activists were ready to step back after Tuesday’s votes and take another look at their options. AP’s Crary writes:
Richard Socarides, who was an adviser on gay-rights issues in the Clinton administration, said the loss in Maine should prompt gay-rights leaders to reconsider their state-by-state strategy on marriage and shift instead to lobbying for changes on the federal level that expand recognition of same-sex couples.
Right-wing Christian activists in both Maine and Washington say they’ve vastly increased their organizational strength during the campaigns in the two states. The right-wing leaders of the campaign against Referendum 71 told Seattle Times that effort revitalized their movement and strengthened the conservative Christian network statewide, by securing ties with hundreds of newer and smaller churches across the state.
Equal Rights Washington, the state's leading advocacy group for gay rights, hopes to counter some of that new strength partly by opening an office in Spokane, to focus educational efforts east of the mountains, Seattle Times reports.
"Movement building is bigger than winning just one campaign," said Connie Watts, ERW executive director, told the Times.
She said her group will “do some rich analysis on the results” once all the votes are in on the referendum. She said that will help the group “focus on those areas where we can make progress.”
Across the country, EqualityMaine and the Maine Civil Liberties Union, also said they will work with supportive religious leaders to organize presentations to various groups, the Press Herald reports.
At the Wednesday rally in Portland, Patricia Peard, a member of the No on 1 executive committee, sought to cheer the downcast crowd. “We are proud of our message. We stand by our message,” she said. “Let us not forget that 47 percent [of voters] stood up and said that gay and lesbian people deserve equality in this state. I assure you, we are going to build to a larger number.”
Source: Urban, rural divide defines differing views on marriage | Bangor Daily News
Fight goes on over marriage | Portland Press Herald
Defeat in Maine a harsh blow to gay-marriage drive | Associated Press/Fresno Bee
Gay-rights support stops at Cascades | Seattle Times
Gay marriage backers return to drawing board | San Francisco Chronicle