Although Maine's "No On 1" campaign, an effort to reject a ballot initiative overturning same-sex marriage in Maine, got much attention, it was ultimately unsuccessful. (For those who are counting, Maine rejected gay marriage by a 4-point margin, and California's Prop. 8 measure passed by 5 points.) Meanwhile, Washington state confirmed Referendum 71, estimated to pass with just over 51 percent of the vote. The AP reports, "Five states have legalized gay marriage — Iowa, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut — but all did so through legislation or court rulings, not by popular vote."

So does this mean that same-sex marriage doesn't pass when put up to a popular vote but same-sex domestic partnerships do? The election results of these two states hardly serve as projection for the rest of the country. After all, Washington state is small and has a firm socially liberal base in Seattle. But if the question is fundamentally about rights, the LGBT community may have to consider if they'd be willing to settle for equalizing rights though domestic partnerships or if they'd have to do a lot more grassroots work to make folks comfortable with letting teh gayz into the insitution of marriage.

UPDATE: The Progress Report today points out that LGBT candidates Annise Parker and Charles Pugh saw victories in local elections.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, at a panel on young conservatives in the New School in New York City, faltered upon responding to a question about gay marriage from a New Yorker fact checker. The New York Observer reports:

The question came from Christopher Glazek, a fact-checker at The New Yorker, who wanted to know whether Mr. Douthat and Mr. Salam believed that former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, who has apologized on behalf of his party for the Southern Strategy, should also apologize for the Republican party's gay politics.

At first Mr. Douthat seemed unable to get a sentence out without interrupting himself and starting over. Then he explained: "I am someone opposed to gay marriage who is deeply uncomfortable arguing the issue in public."

Mr. Douthat indicated that he opposes gay marriage because of his religious beliefs, but that he does not like debating the issue in those terms. At one point he said that, sometimes, he feels like he should either change his mind, or simply resolve never to address the question in public.

He added that the conservative opposition to gay marriage is "a losing argument," and asked rhetorically if committed homosexual relationships ought to be denied the legal recognition accorded without hesitation to the fleeting enthusiasms of Britney Spears and Newt Gingrich.

After the panel, Mr. Douthat told the Observer: "If I were putting money on the future of gay marriage, I would bet on it."

Although Douthat indicated that he disagrees with same-sex marriage in his personal beliefs, he also seemed to indicate that the conservative movement wasn't taking the correct approach on this issue. It's interesting, especially as polling indicates that young people are far more likely to support same-sex marriage. Douthat is generally thought of as a leading conservative voice for his generation, so if he thinks that the current path conservatives are on with same-sex marriage, something might be changing.

(h/t Jesse Singal)

Yesterday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) signed a bill in California that would recognize same-sex marriages from other states. Other states and the District of Columbia have begun recognizing same-sex marriages from the seven states where they're legal. For many states, it becomes a way of supporting LGBT marriage rights if it's not politically possible to pass same-sex marriage at home. This is certainly good news for LGBT rights in California.

Campus Progress Student Representatives at American River College (ARC) in Sacramento, California are working feverishly along with other members of the ARC progressive community to make sure that their campus is not used to support anti-equality policies like California’s Proposition 8.

When the ARC’s Student Council decided to take up a resolution supporting the proposition, which would outlaw same sex marriage, students swung into action by packing the student council meeting to show their opposition. They also collected twice the number of signatures needed for the council members to be recalled. Unfortunately, the resolution was passed, but it is abundantly clear that the vote did not accurately reflect the will of the student body.

You can watch Nancy Dziuba, one of the two Campus Progress Student Representatives on the campus, on the local Fox station speaking about some of the intimidation that members of the progressive and GLBT community have faced at ARC recently:

Jeffrey Rosen isn't happy with the Court's decision:

So what makes the legal reasoning so inflammatory? Most controversially, the Court held that sexual orientation discrimination should be treated just as skeptically as racial discrimination–a conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court and the other state Supreme Courts have refused to accept. Social conservatives are already invoking contested science to question one of the premises of this conclusion: that sexual orientation, like race, is immutable. “There is no evidence to establish that a homosexual lifestyle is an immutable characteristic such as race,” a lawyer for Advocates for Faith and Freedom told The New York Times. There was no need to open this Pandora’s Box: The Court could have held more modestly that there are no rational reasons for limiting the label “marriage” to straight people and denying it to gays and lesbians.

 

I thought the lesson of this free-food-a-thon would be that there is indeed such a thing as a free lunch if you're an intern in D.C. and that if you were into saving money, you could eat a free lunch every day. The real lesson is that regardless of your budget, you should eat a free lunch every day.