Maine voters have defeated a law that allowed same sex marriage in Maine.
photo by flickr user Erin Loughran
Fricking fracking eff word. The state of Maine put gay marriage to the vote, and it was repealed by voters largely due to the efforts of anti-gay lobbying group Stand for Marriage Maine, reports the Bangor Daily News earlier this morning. It’s a sad day for many of my queer American friends, who really would love to get hitched, or just be recognized in the eyes of the law and society. Many Montreal queers believe that gay marriage is a privilege. Well, they’re partly right. I also feel that homeless gay youth and higher suicide rates among queers deserve to be looked at and solutions found. But at present time, the public issue is gay marriage, and, for Americans at least, this goes towards visibility and acceptance in society at large. So really, this is not so much a battle about getting gay divorced gay married or joint mortgage payments or whatever–it’s about homophobia, screaming at us.
This was the voters’ decision. So either apathy was running the show over in Maine (much like Montreal’s recent elections, with a mere 35% voter turnout) or the message is just not getting through. The more people come out, speak out and shout out for rights and demand to be heard and to fucking live their lives, the closer we are to making sure that kid in Portland or Wawa doen’t off himself in an effort to erase the homo inside him.