Gay man, 42, Oakland, California here, keeping it relatively short and as simple as the complexity of my feelings this morning allows.
I can't help but feel like the outcome of the 4 "Protect Marriage" propositions (especially the one here, where we are alleged to know better) stained the rest of what should have been an exhilirating night... when I was watching the crowds of justifiably ecstatic African American people jumping up and down on the grave of 400+ years of disgusting bigotry, it felt amazing but it didn't quite bring the sense of total surrender to the Joy that moment should have produced because I'm gay and I now live in a state -- allegedly the bastion of progressive social attitudes in the US -- that has enshrined a form of specific and malicious second-class citizenship into its Constitution that takes me and those like me to be unfit to be acknowledged as worthy of loving another human being completely.
The sane, tortoise-over-hare, rational part of me knows that this ability, this inexorable drive to Love is indelibly imprinted in all human beings and is therefore not the property of some cowardly Mormon sociopaths-disguised-as-Christians to strip from me, but the emotional part of me is torn inside knowing that I can't fully share the ecstasy I feel for this country as it finally grows up in regards to race, because to many people in California and the larger America it inhabits I am still considered to be subhuman on the basis of the fact that my biological and social imprint causes me to develop sexual and romantic relationships with similarly-imprinted people of the same gender.
This isn't very much fun, and I say that as someone who isn't likely to be married to anyone after spending his adolescence watching his (then-) married, allegedly-heterosexual parents brutalize each other for sport. Personally I don't really engage with the mythology of marriage, that "one" mythically perfect person to have and to hold in one way forever. But I think of my friends, the ones in long-term serious relationships with someone of the same gender that might someday or do now want the option to wed, and all the legal protections it entails.
I think of my friends Greg and Neil, and what is between them and how the law of this land now deems them unworthy of their true feelings for each other. I think of Amanda and Cheri next door, now disallowed from putting a legal stamp of approval on the life they have built together of their own sincere commitment to each other, for better or for worse. I think most of all of the countless couples that were married just a few short months ago and whose union has been summarily and cruelly stripped of its legal weight by people who don't even live in California and who believe that because Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph Smith in a sort of UFO and bestowed upon him the mysterious tablets of Xenu, or whatever it is these maniacs, in their perpetual state of terminal malicious delusion, have convinced their learning-disabled minds is true... that this belief somehow entitles them to determine whether or not my friend Greg would be allowed to visit and care for his partner in the event (god forbid) that anything happened to Neil. It is for these couples that I weep onto this keyboard, and the stain of my tears is symbolic of the stain of hatred and bigotry that these animals have foisted upon us from so many cowardly, unChristian miles away.
I wonder how the cowardly carpetbagging bigots can convince themselves that healthy, committed and stable relationships between consenting adult human beings can do anything but strengthen the very institutions the homophobes claim same-gender marriage or union would somehow obliterate. The truth is they don't care, they want us to die and they'd kill us all outright if they could somehow get away with it, that's how vital they know it is to Daddy-in-the-sky that no man ever be allowed to touch another man's genitals under any circumstances, let alone DARE to live in a spirit of total commitment with another man in violation of the state of permanent, predatory competition that rules their True Belief $y$tem... or, it's not that far from "Mormon" to "Mammon," let's just say. As usual these liars are all for "small government" and so forth until they need the government to legitimize the atavistic contempt they clearly feel for their fellow human beings. They will have to answer for their peculiarly toxic brand of hypoChristian hatred to a power far greater than merely I, and for that I do not envy them. May they spend the furtive days and hours they have left in airport bathroom stalls all across this mighty nation, taking a resolutely wide stance against immorality in all the most... fruitful ways.
Be all of this as it may, I know that this nefarious amendment is just another blip for us on the path to inclusion, and that someone's already probably getting the challenges together to disallow this blatant codification of mental illness into the law of the state of California. But it doesn't make it hurt any less, knowing that every setback like this delays and defers the time when gay kids can grow up in a world where they can believe that they count in the same way as everyone else, and that makes me just boil over with red rage inside, especially watching the press coverage that is making it seem like America is now magically and instantaneously the Land of Total Harmony and Perfect Tolerant Inclusion because we finally got our heads far enough out of our asses to put a black guy, coincidentally perhaps one of the 10 smartest and most inspiring people currently breathing, in charge.
The sense of overwhelming Joy I feel at how the shameful racist bigotry that once ruled this country has been over the course of my short 42 years, both stylistically and substantively, rearview-mirrored is tempered today by the very same timbre of monstrous bigotry having reared its beastly, craven head so close to home here.
We've come a long way but if Justice were a file transfer we'd still only be at about 1% on a flimsy dial-up connection, and that means that yesterday, as monumentally significant as it was, is just baby steps.