At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

I don't think this is something that's going to get ramrodded down via the court system (nor am I entirely convinced that's really the most productive way to go about things in terms of actual de facto social acceptance, as opposed to de jure legality, but I get that nobody likes being told to be patient when their rights are on the line).

There's only one way this goes: finally, a Supreme Court case is gonna have to decide the issue. This bullshit piecemeal approach is wrong-headed and degrading. Gay citizens in the United States are begging straight citizens to be kind enough to grant them the same rights. Put "female" or "black" in there, and we wouldn't even be having a discussion.

The Charter was enshrined to ensure that the rights of minorities are not subjected, are never subjected, to the will of the majority. The rights of Canadians who belong to a minority group must always be protected by virtue of their status as citizens, regardless of their numbers. These rights must never be left vulnerable to the impulses of the majority.

When has there ever been an advance in civil rights in this country where the majority wanted it before it was forced on them legally?

Women's suffrage? Voting rights for blacks? School integration? Interracial marriage? Reproductive choice?

The hard truth is: people are still afraid of this, and our opponents knew how to target their fears very precisely. They have honed it to an art - their prime argument now is that although adults can handle gay equality, children cannot. And so they play straight to heterosexuals whose personal comfort with gay people is fine but who sure don't want their kids to turn out that way. One way to prevent kids turning out that way, the equality opponents argue, is to ensure that they never hear of gay people, except in a marginalized, scary, alien fashion. And this referendum was clearly a vote in which the desire to keep gay people invisible trumped the urge to treat them equally.

I wrote my state senators early on in the process urging them to DO THEIR DAMN JOBS and not let this question go to a referendum

And everybody stop yelling at Maine. 47% voted your way; that hardly makes this a hotbed of backwardness.