Gay Marriage Wins At The Ballot Box, Repeatedly

Gay marriage rights won the popular vote for the first time in the election of November 6, 2012

• Three states had full marriage rights on the ballot: Maine, Maryland, and Washington. All three won.
• Minnesota had a measure on the ballot to amend their constitution to ban gay marriage. It lost.

Same-sex marriage is now the law in Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Mexico. (In Mexico only Mexico City has gay marriage, but those marriages are recognized nationwide.

20% of Americans now live in jurisdictions that grant same-sex couples the same rights as other-sex couples: Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, Washington, and Washington, D.C.

If California’s Prop 8 remains overturned, as it has been by every level of courts so far, then one in four Americans will have legal same-sex marriage.

As a young man, like five or ten years ago, I could not have pictured equality of civil rights arriving so fast.

God Bless America. We stumble along the way, but we get there eventually.

[Update]

Wow. According to to the Human Rights Campaign, these elections made the United States the first country EVER to grant equal marriage rights by the popular vote. “All other marriage-equality measures in the US and elsewhere have been made by legislators or courts.”

There are times I am really proud of my country. We have not celebrated the importance of these victories nearly enough.