2012 November 6

Quadruple Electoral Win for Same-Sex Marriage

 

Same-sex marriage supporters scored a quadruple victory on this day in elections across the country.

Voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington State approved same-sex marriage. Minnesota voters, meanwhile, defeated a ban on same-sex marriage.

The four votes represented a historic development, because same-sex marriage had been defeated in 32 previous referenda around the country. And it also marked the first-time-ever support of gay marriage by a vote of the people. The votes brought the number of states (and the District of Columbia) at that time to ten in which same-sex marriage was legal.

In a fifth victory for LGBT rights on this day, Wisconsin voters elected Tammy Baldwin the first openly gay/lesbian member of the U.S. Senate (November 12, 2012).

On June 26, 2015, in Obergefell v. Hudson, the Supreme Court declared that same-sex marriage was constitutional in the entire United States under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Read about the history of the GLBT revolution: Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (2015)

Learn more at a timeline on same-sex marriage in America: http://www.freedomtomarry.org/pages/history-and-timeline-of-marriage

Read more: Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (1999)

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