50%+1

Chris Crain has had a nice discourse on the reverberations of Prop 8.

Honey - I call it the train effect (my old roommate Don was absolutely fervent on this point). Morbid as the trains sound, any minority in this republic is at the will of the majority - particularly if the Courts are directly or indirectly beholden to the electorate. The trains are an obvious reference to the Nazi regime (never a republic) but the effect can result in the same outcome. The tyranny of the majority over the minority is always real.
1)Ask anyone Black and over 50. They lived in the times of majority rule when young (and with no effective controverting argument, they still suffer broadly from this effect).
2) Ask any dead woman (seance needed) who wanted to vote and could not; they lived in a majority rule republic.
3) Ask a Native American (seance optional or just drive through a reservation for a more current view) and they lived/live in a majority rule (after they were either shot or driven West with the threat of being shot)
4) Ask a Jew in the 1950s trying to get into an Ivy League school.
5) Ask a gay guy suffering from GRID/AIDS in the 1980s when Reagan could not even say the acronym, much less bring the government to solve a major health crisis (read: gay genocide) in the gay community.

The list goes on. Our, that is the gay collective, existence is allowed by varying degrees to continue (and compared to earlier times thrive) by the will of the majority. In actuality, we gays, as the minority, rely upon the courts to protect us from the whim of the majority. Prop 8 is the reality - we are allowed to exist but NOT to be equal in the largest and most progressive state in these United States. And the will of the majority rebuked the courts. The will of the majority can always trump courts via direct action at the voting booth.

This is a bleak view compared with Chris Crain and his comment trail - they rage. I offer the words in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence to put this rage into context.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I hate to say it - but Prop 8 could substitute marriage for trains. As my roommate Don used to say - "I won't go without a fight".

If Jefferson, in writing the Declaration (and holding slaves at the same time) could posit so obvious a lie in the political sense, then why should we expect to be treated as equals? We expect the foundations of our country to protect us based upon their written word. But is the minority protected?

Just a quick dig: HRC is sponsoring facials as a tonic to our loss. That is the response. As a minority subjected to the tyranny of the majority - a seaweed wrap is not going to work when the majority rolls back the court protections of gays.