I don't draw broad conclusions from last night's off-year election results. It's tough to say whether the GOP governor victories were the start of a good trend for the party, or just part of a backlash against incumbents in a year with a monumentally awful economy. And it's tough to say whether the right's implosion in upstate New York is a sign of things to come, or just one badly mismanaged fight from which they'll learn valuable lessons about the limitations of the "red meat for the base" strategy. So my biggest reaction to the voting results was sadness about the decision of Mainers to deprive thousands of their fellow citizens equal rights under the marriage laws. New England was getting pretty close to being a solid block of equal-rights states (with Rhode Island as the lone outlier), but now Maine has had a backslide.

In the long run, I'm not too worried about the marriage laws. Anti-homosexual bigotry is vastly greater among the older generation than younger people, so it's just a matter of time before discrimination against gays in marriage laws is a thing of the past in this country. Within a few decades, it'll be as hard to find someone willing to admit he fought for anti-gay-marriage laws as it is today to find someone willing to admit he fought for anti-miscegenation (anti-interracial-marriage) laws. Within a generation or two, public opinion will have swung so much that people who fought on the side of the bigots will be embarrassed even to admit they did so. But it's still sad to see the occassional back-sliding. I've got a gay friend who lives in Maine, and I'm upset on her behalf that she'll be deprived the right most of us get to take for granted, of simply getting married to the person we love.