As of 10:14 pm, the vote to approve Referendum 71 is leading by a thin margin, 51% to 49%. Many votes still to be counted.
Sadly, it looks as though we lost in Maine. My heart goes out to you all up there. Except you fuckers who couldn't be bothered to vote. You I shun.
More tomorrow.
So now it's tomorrow.We lost in Maine--53% to 47%. Close enough to be both a terrible and a hopeful result. My hope is that folks keep chipping away at the prejudice and eventually it will be close in our favour.
Here in Washington, unless something truly bizarre and unforeseen happens, we've won. Yes, it's only 51% to 49%, yes there are still votes to be counted--but most of those votes are from the more liberal counties around Puget Sound, so I wouldn't be surprised to see our percentage rise a point or even two.
This is pretty astonishing when you consider what happened here just 12 years ago--the rejection, by 60% to 40% of a basic anti-discrimination bill. Think about that. We have won one percent per year to our side. One percent of voters, every single year, have gone from thinking we don't even need to be protected from discrimination to believing we deserve equal rights when it comes to family law. That, right there, is worth taking a moment to ponder.
I wish it were happening more quickly but the fact is, it is happening. At some point soon our quiltbag nation will have federal rights--something very similar, I think, to Washington's everything-but-marriage law, i.e. marridge. Then no one will be able to do what Jackson Memorial hospital did to Janice Langbehn and her partner, Lisa. No one will have to spend years fighting immigration, as I did (scroll past the sharks' virgin birth--oh, just go read it). No one will be stuck in legal limbo like the people who got married in California and now find themselves with no mechanism for divorce.
I'm going to go make a cup of tea and ponder the good things in life and work out how I can help to make them ever better.
