Shifting Attitudes Toward Gay Marriage in USA

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Accompanying the reelection of President Obama, voters also voted in great strides toward gay rights in the USA, including the election of openly gay Tammy Baldwin as a US Senator from Wisconsin. Obama, despite his open support for gay marriage, was easily reelected. I'm delighted to see voters in the USA starting to have had just about enough of the religious right dictating how others should have to live their private lives and recognizing that gays are entitled to the same rights and privileges as anybody else.
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Voters Approve Same-Sex Marriage for the First Time

By Ben Brumfield, CNN
Wed November 7, 2012

(CNN) -- In a historic turnaround, the ballot box is showing America's shifting attitudes about same-sex marriage. After gay marriage rights died at the polls dozens of times in the past, on Tuesday they passed in at least two states.

Rarely do popular votes reflect such dramatic social changes.

The result: Maryland and Maine will now allow couples like Cyrino Patane and James Trinidad to tie the knot.

The Maryland couple has been together for seven years, and now, after the historic vote, they plan to marry in the next six months to a year.

"Both families will be at the wedding," Patane said.

But the win was hard fought and the margin of victory was small.

"We've lost at the ballot box 32 times," said Paul Guequierre of Human Rights Campaign. "History was made tonight."

In Maine, Erica Tobey and Ali Ouellette wed in September, but only now will the women's marriage be recognized under Maine law.

"It's hard to overstate the national significance of this vote," Marc Solomon, campaign director at Freedom to Marry, said of the Maine referendum.

In Maryland, where just 51.9% of voters approved gay marriage rights, "It was a little bit pins and needles," said Human Rights Campaign's Kevin Nix. "It was going to be a close call all along."

A similar ballot measure in Washington state is pending. And in Minnesota, voters rejected a measure that would have banned same-sex marriage.

Pollsters got a hint of the coming change. Recent national surveys have shown shifting attitudes toward same-sex marriage, with a majority of Americans now approving of marriages between two men or two women.

A CNN/ORC poll in June found that a majority of Americans support marriage rights for gays and lesbians, reflecting the shift in public opinion.

The number of Americans who say they have a close friend or family member who is gay or lesbian, meanwhile, has jumped from 49% in 2010 to 60% today, the first time in CNN polling that a majority of Americans have said that. In the 1990s, most Americans said they did not know anyone close to them who was gay.

Election Day brought two additional gains for proponents of same-sex marriage: Wisconsin elected America's first openly lesbian Senator, Democrat Tammy Baldwin, and President Obama became the first president to openly support same-sex marriage and get re-elected.

Full story: http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/politics/ ... index.html