Word: gayness
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...Director for the Democrats, the volunteers focused most intensely on the Maine referendum, known as Proposition 1. The Democrats have been teaming up with the QSA to campaign against Prop 1 every Sunday for the past month. “Especially after Prop 8 passed last year and eliminated gay marriage in California, it’s definitely an important race,” Wenger said...
Mainers' 53-47 vote to reject gay marriage does more than simply slap down a law that just six months ago had made Maine the U.S.'s second state to permit same-sex couples to wed. With voters thronging to the polls, the closely watched - and ultimately not very close - vote extended the winning streak of gay-marriage opponents nationwide, who have now prevailed in more than 30 straight state elections over whether to allow gays to marry. Just like Californians one year ago, Maine voters insisted on having their say on an issue that simply will not go away...
...Watching the results come in at the historic Eastland Park Hotel in downtown Portland, Scott Fish of the Stand for Marriage Maine campaign told TIME that the other side had acted with too much haste and too little respect for voters' wishes. "What's the hurry [for gay marriage]?" asked Fish, whose group began seeking a so-called people's veto almost immediately after Maine's Democratic (and Catholic) governor, John Baldacci, signed the gay-marriage bill in May. (See a visual history of gay rights in America...
...Maine's vote, much like all of the states before it, including California's vote on Prop 8 a year ago, will do little to slow the fight over gay marriage. Not in Maine, where Tuesday's vote was only the equivalent of a veto and can be easily reversed by lawmakers when they next meet, and not in the rest of country, where the issue continues to roil courthouses and statehouses alike. "Ultimately, this is going to have to have a national resolution," says same-sex-marriage activist Mary Bonauto, one of the nation's top lawyers involved...
...That decision has been cited in numerous cases that have followed, as the number of states whose courts have demanded equal marriage rights for gays has grown. But those same cases have also helped fuel opponents, who say gay marriage is being foisted upon the U.S. by out-of-touch judges. In order to counter that argument, Bonauto and other gay-marriage activists in Maine who began organizing to press for gay marriage there decided to avoid taking the issue to court. Instead, they set about electing lawmakers who were friendly to their cause two years ago, and this year...