“When it comes to marriage,” said Maggie Gallagher in National Review Online, “there are no blue states/red states.” The victory of a ballot measure—in California, of all places, as well as in Florida and Arizona—saying that unions of a husband and wife “deserve a unique status in our culture and law” proved that. “All victories are temporary in a fallen world. But this one is sweet.”
Sure, provided you’re not one of the people “whose rights and dignity” were just stripped away by a majority, said Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic online. For those people—the gay couples who just became “second-class citizens and second-class human beings”—the passage of California’s Proposition 8 was “heart-breaking news.”
“The same-sex marriage issue won’t go away,” said the Chico, Calif., Enterprise-Record in an editorial. The fight during the campaign over California’s Proposition 8 was frequently insulting and mean-spirited. And elections these days never seem to unite us. They only make the losing side mad and leave us more divided than ever.
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