It's not over:
We are in conversations with the Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council and Citizen Link to provide resources for churches, pastors and Christians who will need legal protections for our religious liberties. We want to discern the possible impact of redefining marriage as well as the remedies. Our priority is to help ensure your opportunity to live out your faith and ministry without interference. We are exploring the possibility of returning to the ballot again to overturn this egregious new definition of marriage. That may mean another campaign, including a signature drive to get it back on another ballot. We urge you to stay in touch with the Christian Civic League and be a part of our ongoing efforts with this and other important issues. We cannot hope to maintain or increase our effectiveness unless we maintain our lines of communication with you.
No matter how much we fight, no matter how many ballot measures we finally win, there are those who will continue to put roadblocks on the road to equal protection under civil law.
Yes, civil law -- churches will still be free to refuse to conduct same-sex marriage ceremonies, just as many will refuse to perform marriages between Christians and Jews, or Christians and Muslims, or anyone that's not of their particular faith or member of the congregation. At the same time, there are plenty of churches where they have no problem with marriage equality -- for example the Episcopal Church allows same-sex ceremonies if the local bishop is okay with it and if they're allowed under state law (such as IA, MA, and others including the 3 that just adopted their measures on Tuesday). Why should these alleged "Christians" take priority over everyone else?
A line from Keith Olbermann's brilliant commentary on Proposition 8 comes to mind:
What if someone told you, you couldn't marry?
What, indeed?
But this is why President Obama's re-election matters. Basic civil rights (of which marriage is one, as ruled by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia) cannot be left up to the whim of the electorate. A married couple in Massachusetts or New York cannot be considered legal strangers if they happen to wander into North Carolina or Kansas. It will be the courts that will inevitably tell the haters, the "Christian" Civic Leagues and NOMs and American "Family" Associations that all men and women are entitled to this basic civil right, to marry the person they love and wish to share the rights and responsibilities of marriage. And I feel far better with Barack Obama appointing those judges at the Federal level than I would a Willard Romney who would be beholden to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.