Since the passage last Tuesday of Question 1, gay marriage advocates have dealt with the disappointment in different ways
Ray Dumont woke up Wednesday and took his son to school.
Chris O’Connor took to the streets.
The referendum election on Tuesday dealt another blow to gay marriage advocates in the US. The passage of Question 1-which struck down LD 1020, the bill that legalized gay marriage-makes Maine the thirty-first state to ban gay marriage through a vote of the people.?
The Maine Legislature passed LD 1020 last spring, and Governor John Baldacci signed it into law less than an hour later. Shortly after the bill’s signing, religious and conservative groups mounted opposition and by September had gathered almost double the 55,000 signatures required to have a people’s veto of the measure put to vote.?
After an epic battle between the Yes On 1 and No On 1 camps, the veto passed 53-47 percent.
O’Connor, the assistant dean of university life at USM, had taken a week and a half off from work to volunteer for the No On 1 campaign.
“We probably did about anywhere between 12 and 16 hours a day,” he Wednesday morning.
“This past weekend [of Oct. 30], it was more like 20 hours a day.”
The day after the election, O’Connor was in mourning.
“It’s devastating, but at the same time I think it’s a harsh reality check that there’s so much more work that has to be done,” he said. “I feel the most inspirational year of my life just came to a crashing halt. Anybody that worked on this campaign, some for five years, some for a week, some since just yesterday, I think every body feels that exact sentiment.”
But on Friday night, he helped lead a crowd of 300 people in a march down Congress Street.
Ray Dumont, the business manager for the Student Government office at USM, was at the center of the fight against Question 1. He and his family were featured prominently in TV commercial spots and on pamphlets mailed out to thousands of Mainers.
“Yeah, I’m disappointed, but by and large, except for the final result, this whole thing has been so positive,” Dumont said. “260,000 people voted in favor of gay marriage. That’s huge. That’s an enormous leap in the right direction. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Maine just wasn’t quite ready for it yet.”
Ironically, Dumont frames his view of marriage and family in the same way gay-marriage opponents do-it’s something no one can change.
“If I stop and think about it, I have nothing less than I had the day before,” he said. “I still have my relationship of 11 years-and that’s not going to stop. I still have my son. We’re still a family. They can take away our definition of marriage, but they can’t take away the definition of family.”
“Honestly, I think it’s still about conversations, its still about about one-to-one face-to-face contact with everyone in our lives,” said O’Connor, of the next phase of the fight to legalize gay marriage.
Dumont was amazed at the campaigning efforts of the No camp, but said deeply ingrained beliefs of the definition of marriage can’t change overnight.
“I try to put myself in their position,” he said. “I get the religious piece. But on the other hand, this law was written to exclude that. The fact of the matter is, there is a long, long tradition of marriage being between a man and a woman. You don’t just change that. It takes time.”
“I volunteer at my son’s school, my partner coaches the soccer team. We go to everything, we’re part of our community. People see that we are just a family. And it takes away all of those things that make people think we’re so different from everybody else. There are people who have told us, ‘I was probably going to vote no anyway, but because I know your family, it’s so personal to me, that of course I’m going to vote no.”
Dumont took solace in the words of his 9-year-old son Ethan, who in an interview with a documentary film maker, offered his own philosophy on the passing of Question 1.
He said, ‘if they win, they don’t really get anything, they just keep marriage. If we win, we get marriage and we’ve taken nothing away from them, so what’s the problem?’ It was so interesting to me to see my son distill this down to very simple terms,” he said.
Dumont sees his son’s attitude as a sign of hope.
“We’re raising our kid to not be judgmental, and to be inclusive, and to value each person equally. If we raise a generation like that, if it isn’t my generation that does it, it’s gonna be his.”
But O’Connor was battling with the knowledge that a friend of his had voted ‘yes’ on Question 1.
“I really struggled with that. I beat myself up because this is someone who is a friend of mine, and through every interaction I’ve had with him, can look at me and say [he doesn’t] believe in equal rights.”
“And I get it,” he said, then paused to think. “I don’t get it… I don’t get it at all, actually.”