So anybody I have spent any amount of time in the political world with would tell you that I can be a smug, arrogant, know it all. Whether I mean to or not, I come off like I am telling the world "I told you so" over and over again.
Well today, its an I told you so that I hate giving. We lost in Maine as I predicted time and time again. I am in no way insulting the efforts of all the volunteers and campaign staff who have devoted their lives to this fight. But the fact remains, we will never win a civil rights battle at the ballot box.
Yes, we had no choice. The second Question 1 was placed on the ballot, we had only one option, fight it. And fight it we did. We fought hard, we got our message out there, we changed some minds, and we made our statement. But the fact remains, we lost.
So what can we take from this? What we can take is that a few marches, protests, rallies, have not changed public opinion all that much in the year since Prop 8. We can take the fact that we are seeing a queer "Bradley Effect". We are seeing that people are lying to pollsters, and ourselves. They are ashamed to be bigots, but they are still bigots.
We barely won domestic partnerships in a liberal state like Washington, could you imagine if that were a marriage fight, and we lost it there?
I think we need to think long and hard before we attempt to go to the ballot ourselves. These campaigns cost us millions of dollars, and even if we win, its very few rights we gain, as federal marriage is where all the rights are.
It is not time to stop fighting - it is time to fight smarter. Otherwise, I will be writing more and more I told you so posts - and my friends tell me my ego is already big enough.
The Angry Queer
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