Gay Marriage Update and Election Aftermath Part 1: Gay Marriage Results

You surely know by now that Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney for the presidency.  You also probably know that the House of Representatives remains under GOP control while the Democrats retained control of the Senate.  These will get all the headlines even though it simply represents no change and two more years of the past two years.  I’ll come back to those in future posts.

For now, I want to focus on where change did happen, namely the gay marriage votes.  I don’t really have much to say about the marijuana legalizations except that the stage is being set for a Constitutional or states’ rights showdown between the federal government and various states that I’m looking forward to and will explore at some point. 

You’ll recall that three states were voting on approvals (Maryland, Maine, and Washington state) and Minnesota was voting on a ban.  I predicted a split for gay marriage supporters (Maryland and Washington) and opponents (Maine and Minnesota) to erase the goose-egg.  I was wrong.

As of right now, it appears the gay marriage movement went 4 for 4, winning approvals 52-48 in Maryland and Washington and 53-47 in Maine.  The Minnesota ban appears destined for defeat at 51-47.  These were all close races, as I expected, though I didn’t expect a clean sweep for the gay marriage movement.

One quick clarification.  Prior to this election, gay marriage did have one popular vote victory where Arizona’s proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, Proposition 107, was defeated in 2006.  There was still no approval victory until this time around.  So, technically, there was a goose-egg coming into this week on offense, but not on defense. 

Clarifications aside, the gay marriage movement continues to gain momentum.  These victories bolster confidence and reduce doubt in the effort.  The federal level is still the key and that battle is being waged mainly in the Supreme Court, but probably will also come up in the legislative process.’  California is the key state-level battleground.  More to come on this topic later.

I was originally going to roll some other election 2012 thoughts into this post, but I found something more on gay rights worth discussing here.  I recently saw two articles on the matter worth sharing.

Here’s the key excerpt from one of them:

According to Obama, "it would be up to future generations of Americans to implement meaningful reform," ABC added.

Also, take a look at this quote from the second article.

"The courts are going to be examining these issues. I've stood up and said I'm opposed to the so-called Defense of Marriage Act ... I've said that's wrong, [and] there are a couple of cases that are working their way through the courts, and my expectation is that Defense of Marriage Act will be overturned. But, ultimately, I believe that if we have that conversation at the state level, the evolution that's taking place in this country will get us to a place where we are going to be recognizing everybody fairly."

I have one key point here.  He shows his belief that this is ultimately a states’ rights discussion.  That means he doesn’t believe it’s the federal government’s job to decide here.  DOMA is on the books at the federal level.  By not pushing to repeal DOMA and simply hoping it gets overturned, he’s saying that he doesn’t want to use active federal intervention to undo active federal intervention.  If marriage is a state-level matter, then Obama just said that federal tinkering in marriage has to go and he thus should be working to repeal DOMA.  Am I the only one who sees the logical problem here?

Between the first quote and the second quote, I think it’s safe to conclude that Obama has turned his back on the gay rights movement.  This won’t reverse the momentum, but it does clearly hurt.  It shows us the movement is on its own and should not expect meaningful help from the Democrat establishment at the federal level.  Remember, the sitting president is generally viewed, fairly or not, as also the party leader. 

The expected counter is that I’m reading too much into what he said and didn’t say, thereby inserting my own interpretation.  That counter is coming, and, as usual, it’s wrong.  By saying it would be up to future generations to implement meaningful reform, you’ll notice he didn’t say that the present generation will implement meaningful reform.  The present generation would be during his second term in office.  He also clearly shied away from using federal intervention to undo the federal intervention of DOMA.

Last, note the date on the article.  This was published BEFORE the election.  Talk about an insult to the movement.  Politicians typically wait until after the election to say something like that to deflate a voting bloc.  The fact that he did this before the election speaks volumes about how much of an ally Obama truly is to the gay rights movement.  Did anybody hear anything about this before the vote?  I sure didn’t and I pay pretty good attention to this kind of stuff.  I think a lot of gay rights advocates should be questioning why they voted for Obama in the wake of this story. 

The bottom line for now is we had four victories for the gay marriage movement via three successful approvals and a defeated ban while we also had general elections that effectively gave us two more years of the last two years and Obama abandoned the gay rights movement even before the election ended.

Links:

http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-to-mtv-i-won-t-be-pushing-gay-marriage-second-term?fb_action_ids=10100953713956471&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1696360/president-obama-same-sex-marriage-equality.jhtml