Following this month's clean sweep in 11 states, amendments banning gay marriage are likely to be on the ballot in at least 12 to 15 more states next year, reports the Christian Science Monitor.
And as was the case in nine of the 13 state amendments passed since August, most ballot measures are likely to target officially sanctioned civil unions and other nonmarriage forms of domestic partnership as well.
At the federal level, Karl Rove plans to keep pushing to amend
the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage. According to the
Monitor:
Advocates of the amendment (which will be reintroduced in the new Congress) picked up support among newly elected senators and representatives - a sure majority in the House and a likely majority of the Senate, although both chambers have considerable distance to go before reaching the two-thirds majority necessary to amend the Constitution.
But at the same time, the Monitor reports:
Most Americans oppose gay marriage. But they're also against a US constitutional amendment. And most approve either legalizing same-sex marriage or officially sanctioning civil unions for such couples, according to exit polls in this month's election. Even Mr. Bush has spoken approvingly of state-established civil unions for gay couples.
And Matt Foreman is quoted saying something that's not
crazy:
"Let's not pretend it doesn't hurt," says Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "We need to step back, reflect, and process why the margins of loss in most of the states were depressingly large, where we should go from here, and how we are going to get there."
For one thing, Mr. Foreman told the group's annual conference in St. Louis just days after the election, gay-rights advocates failed to build sufficient grass-roots support before it began lobbying lawmakers and filing lawsuits....
"If the movement had been thinking clearly, we would have had a political and public education strategy that preceded the legal strategy," he said. "That obviously didn't happen."
No, I guess it didn't.
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