You win some. You lose more.

As I write this, a black man has finally been elected President of the United States. It's a day for the record books, a fitting end to an election "season" that lasted way too long.

Unfortunately, also as I write this, 58.7% of precincts reporting have recorded the passage of Proposition 8 - the proposed amendment to the California state constitution to ensure discrimination against gay people - by 5%.

I want to cry.

Arguments I heard today in favor of Prop 8 included "I have no defense for voting for it, but my gut reaction is that it's just not right for people of the same sex to be able to get married," and the woman who told NPR she voted for it because if it failed, schools would "teach gay" to little kids who would grow up to be gay, and thus, we would suddenly find ourselves overwhelmed in a flood of gay people, as if homosexuality is the plague, and merely by talking about it, we would infect the entire nation with a virulent disease from which there was no respite. When it was pointed out to her that schools do not teach homosexuality and that parents have the right to opt-out of any sort of sex ed for their kids, she said she knew that, but she didn't want her children to hear that it was okay for gay people to be married, because then they might want to do it. I was pounding my steering wheel and shrieking at my radio in frustration. The ignorance and outright stupidity of that is untenable. Maybe if someone's breaking down your door to rape you at gunpoint and you just pretend they aren't there, they'll suddenly cease to exist and you can keep watching your "stories" without interruption or pain too, but I highly frigging doubt it. That, in and of itself, is the most moronic thing I have ever heard, but pile the whole "teach gay" thing on top of it, and I really wanted to just slap her. And as it turns out, I live in a state full of her. Millions of her. And they're allowed to get married and reproduce, propogating their ignorance and stupidity to the end of days, making sure that no one outside their safe little boxes has the right to live the same lives. But gay people are what we should all be afraid of.

Yeah. Right.