No, I don’t blame the Churches. I don’t blame religion. I don’t blame those people who spread messages of hate. I don’t blame the idiots who bought into their arguments. I blame the laws that allowed people to simply vote away our civil rights.

Religion owes us nothing. The law, on the other hand, has an obligation to protect us, even if said law is unpopular with the masses. Democracy can sometimes be taken too far, and we have clearly seen that in Maine and California. Laws were introduced to give us the rights we deserve, and laws were used to overturn those rights.

It’s time to change the law to prevent the population from overturning decisions by the courts, but our elected representatives. Sure, in some places that may mean we have a battle to convince a smaller group of people to accept change, to accept that we are entitled to certain rights, but that battle will be much easier to win than one fought against the religiously indoctrinated general public.

We rely on the courts to protect our rights. We rely on elected officials to implement laws to grant us rights. If those rights are to be taken away then it is the courts and legislature who should be the ones to take them away – not wider society.

Our focus now should be on changing the law to ensure that the next time a court or legislative body grants us rights, the public cannot simply vote them away. Until the law is changed we must view any victory as a temporary one, one that can be taken away at any time.

But it’s just a matter of time. We need to keep pushing it and I think sooner rather than later it is going to happen. They won’t win forever.

How to get people to listen to reason and not there “made up facts” is the question we have yet to answer.

Similarly when we talk about coming out and getting to know people and the effect it has it’s an example of our using cognitive dissonance. No one wants to think that their beloved friend/son/mother/uncle/etc. is a horrible person, so we create a cognitive dissonance wall against the lies against homosexuality.

Unfortunately just coming out is too slow, and doesn’t exactly work for a campaign. We need to find a way to really show people who they are hurting. We need to put up our children who are left without protections, and stark harsh pictures of someone crying in a hospital lobby while their loved one dies in a room of a hospital they aren’t allowed into. People need to be shown that, because they won’t want to believe that is something they are supporting. The time to take the gloves off is long since past, so why haven’t the people running these campaigns taken the gloves off?

Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many in the gay community act as if we can win our rights through force. . .and as Maine proved, that simply is not the case.