Really. I’m serious.

I think the untold story is the Yes on 1 ground game. The whole S4MM operation was very secretive. I did not read a single internal campaign leak over the course of 4 months. Their ground campaign is one giant black box. Schubert claimed to have 100,000 people on the ground in CA on Election Day 2008 – 5 volunteers for each of CA’s 20,000 precincts. I saw no evidence of this in ME, but it is blindingly obvious that he had something on the ground in places like Augusta. Were these people quietly recruited from Catholic churches? Were they Mormons slipped into the state in the dead of night?

Tristram is right: The theocratic fascists have yet another victory, and just as Prop. 8 proved they could win in a supposedly liberal and pro-gay state, Question 1 proves they can defeat a measure passed by a state legislature while fighting a campaign that is both better-funded and far more competent than No On 8 was. We should be prepared for the possibility that our victories in Iowa, New Hampshire and even Vermont may be short-lived.

Let’s be realistic. A majority of Americans still hate and fear us. We can blame the lying and scare tactics of groups like NOM, but there’s one thing we can’t deny: They work. And they work for a reason, because the people whom they are able to persuade were biased against us from the beginning and already saw our relationships as a threat. All they needed was a little push.

I read an article the other day in which a woman in Maine who said she had gay relatives and nothing against gay people, but still planned to vote “Yes.” Likewise, my partner’s fundamentalist Christian brother and his family knows about us and sees us pretty frequently, but would likely vote to ban gay marriage if given the chance also.

I really think our best hope is that the Supreme Court will rule that civil rights aren’t a popularity contest, but that’s obviously not a sure thing. We should be open to the possibility that we’ll probably have to wait another 20-30 years before having full equality in this country, while Canadians already have it…

The more I look at it, the more I regard this country’s claims to being the world’s greatest nation as being sort of like Budweiser’s service mark “The King of Beers.” It’s an empty phrase that ignores how seriously behind the curve we really are.

However, yesterday’s defeat clearly has to give pause to the repeal Prop 8 movement. Since it is unlikely that the repeal 8 people could do any better in messaging and GOTV than the No on 1 people, they may need to reconsider 2012 and start pondering 2018, by which time enough Prop 8 voters will have died for a rematch to make sense.

Does anyone really think that Brown v Board of Education would have stood up to popular vote at the time?

As I said before. Stop playing Mr Nice Gay. Act Up.