Thank You Maine

Dear Maine Majority Voters:

Thank you. Seriously. I mean it. So many have so much to thank you for.

Thank you for confirming that some things in life never change, including the fact that ignorance can be nearly impossible to eradicate despite relentless, repeated doses of new knowledge and pleas to progress for everyone's benefit.

Thank you for continuing the great American tradition of trying to infect secular law with religious bigotry and for showing those of us capable of distinguishing between the two that we still have a lot of work ahead of us.

Thank you for proving I was right to worry that, even in Maine which allegedly prides itself on insular independence, too many of you are susceptible to the cynical pre-packaged politics of fear imported from outside your state by mercenaries who sell their amoral silver tongues to whoever can pay.

Thank you for giving a dose of reality to thousands of your fellow citizens who have now learned the hard way that many of their neighbors will go out of their way to prevent them and their kids from having the same legal stability most take for granted.

Thank you for teaching the children of those families that they and their parents have a place in American history: the same place as the families of African-American slaves before the Civil War with no legal status and which were ignored by the "masters" who broke them up at will with impunity, convinced it was their right to do so.

Thank you for teaching those kids that when they get older, they can never take legal guarantees of equality for granted and must fight you and your perniciously prejudiced kind with every ounce of strength, every hour of every day, every day of every year for as long as they have breath. God willing, you have just forged the next generation of pro-equality activists within your own citizenry who will not stop fighting until your brand of bigotry is dead, dead, dead.

Thank you for confirming the consistency of human nature in clinging furiously to prejudices with no rational basis, just because they are familiar, comfortable, and require none of the work or thought or worrisome self-questioning that progress always demands.

Thank you for saving me and many others expensive plane fares, since I and countless other Americans will now vote with our wallets and will stay away from a state so demonstrably hostile to basic fairness and equality, despite its own rhetoric. We can now relinquish you to what you obviously want to remain: a hard to reach, off the beaten track backwater, determined to resist any leadership role and content to stay at the back of the cultural bus.

Thanks for giving those who hoodwinked you another reason to demonstrate their insufferable arrogance on a national stage, so that we who oppose them will be re-energized to continue fighting the hubris that thinks it has the right to tell all Americans who and how to love.

I promise you, Maine majority voters, that you are on the losing side in a much bigger battle. You may have fended off fairness, equality and justice for now, but those tides cannot be stopped. Your re-enactment of California's Proposition 8 will have the same effect as it did on the other coast. You have only injected new energy and new determination into the hearts of those who will one day drag your state, kicking and screaming along with others, into the sunlight of the equality and fairness that the Constitution and our national sense of justice demands.

It's not over.