AFTER QUESTION 1

While no landslide, the vote in favor of preserving Maine’s anti-discrimination protection based on sexual orientation finished a significant 10 points ahead and signaled that Maine has, for now anyway, answered a question that has diminished in meaning with each passing year. Opponents of the law, the Yes side, might take comfort in knowing that not much will change in Maine as a result of Tuesday’s decision.

As had been pointed out during the campaign, the protections were never about special rights for gays. The classes already protected under the Maine Human Rights Act include women, the elderly, minority races – adding up to a majority of Maine citizens; the protections were special only in the sense that some classes that have faced discrimination weren’t covered. Whether homosexuality was behavioral or purely genetic was answered during this year’s debate: It doesn’t matter; the act covers behavior too – religion is another protected class.

Moreover, the fear that many people had that this provision in the act would be abused was answered by experience. Not only do all other New England states have this protection, so do places in Maine such as Portland, Bangor and Brunswick among other cities, and so do state government and the University of Maine System and businesses such as Unum and Bath Iron Works.

In the world beyond this region, Andrew Sullivan points out in the Nov. 1 issue of The New Republic that in 1995 only 21 of the Fortune 500 companies provided domestic-partner benefits for gay partners. Now 216 do, just as 49 of the Fortune 50 companies offer nondiscrimination protection for gay employees. The standard for these businesses is not only accepting gays as valued workers but actually moving to provide employment protection for them.

This is a huge and rapid change in attitude over a single generation and it and much other evidence lead Mr. Sullivan to this: “The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.” Rather than divisive caricature, no longer seeing gays as gay first and everything else they are secondarily would be a relief to every one.

And that leads to a faction of the Yes on 1 group, the Coalition for Marriage, which yesterday announced its intention to pass a state constitutional amendment to prevent gays from marrying. At least that’s a debate the country is still having and on a subject – what marriage means – the country is ambivalent about.

Let’s hope that, unlike the gay rights debate, it doesn’t take 27 years to settle here.