Students Lost Maine Gay Marriage Battle, But Not the War

When it was announced – lo, one year ago! – that Barack Obama had been elected president, students at colleges around the nation were ecstatic. Cold November weather be damned, young men and women here at Bowdoin took to the quad with screams of patriotism and pride that could electrify even the most politically apathetic. The overwhelmingly liberal student body had tasted success, and it was sweet.

After last week's state elections in Maine, Bowdoin students were decidedly more tranquil. Question 1, a people's veto of a bill signed last May legalizing gay marriage, had passed with 53 percent of the vote – gay marriage would be legal no longer.

The implications of the vote had been the cause of sweeping excitement among Bowdoin students. Bowdoin goes to great lengths to be an open and accepting place for gay men and women, so much so that one anti-gay marriage speaker called the college "a glimpse into the oppressive future of homosexualist ascendancy." Had Mainers rejected the veto, their state would have been the first to approve gay marriage by popular vote, and many saw the chance for a rebound after the passage of Proposition 8 in California last year.

As if the choir needed more preaching, student advocates worked relentlessly to promote the "No on 1" campaign on campus in anticipation of the Nov. 3 election. Students returned wide-eyed and well-rested for the fall semester and found a decently visible "No on 1" marketing campaign, most of it the work of the Bowdoin College Democrats (BCD). By early October, their now-bleary eyes saw a campus completely blanketed in "No on 1" posters, flyers, and chalked messages. When it came time to vote, the antsy (or lazy) could go to the student union two weeks before Election Day and not only register, but also cast an absentee ballot without ever having to leave the campus. For those who waited until last Tuesday to vote with the rest of Maine, the BCD organized a fleet of free shuttles to ferry students back and forth from voting locations.

In a previous post, I said there is something special about Maine that makes it uniquely suited to fostering student activism. The state's government is remarkably open and welcoming to citizen engagement, its colleges are very well respected, and its tight-knit communities lend themselves to local organization.

The lingering question was whether all the student involvement in Maine politics would actually work. On the health care front, despite the tortuously sluggish pace of reform, it could be argued that activism in Maine has been successful. The goal was a "yes" vote by Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe on the Senate Finance Committee version of the health care bill, and students stuffed weekly phone-banking sessions, information tables, and canvassing drives into the empty spaces of already brimming syllabi. After receiving an untold number of phone calls and letters on the subject of health care reform, Snowe did indeed vote "yes."

But on the subject of yes votes, comes the enigma of Question 1. By all accounts, student activists working in support of marriage equality in Maine did everything right. Student turnout at the polls – disappointingly low nationwide – was strong at both Bowdoin, which lacks specific numbers but saw roughly one-quarter of students vote early, and the more populous University of Maine Orono, which matched its turnout for last year's presidential election. Local engagement efforts also paid off, as 67 percent of voters in Brunswick – home to Bowdoin – rejected Question 1. The "No on 1" campaign at large was focused and honest, secured a huge turnout in its base, and spent twice as much as its opponent. On the opposing side, "Yes on 1" came off as disjointed and "amateurish" to many in its use of fear tactics that warned of a dangerous side effect of marriage equality: the teaching of gay marriage in public schools.

So what happens when months of canvassing, phone-banking, and collaboration with a classy and spendthrift campaign yield high voter turnout and a disappointing loss? The natural feeling is one of helplessness. Student activists have their sphere of influence in their college and its town, but what effect can they have in northern Maine, which resoundingly affirmed the people's veto? For the army of students that marched to the tune of inextinguishable hope in the happier days of the Obama campaign, does hopelessness set in with a defeat like this one?

What student activists need is not a new angle. They need some perspective. Obama may have inspired an anything-is-possible attitude, but in reality one can only do so much, and the amount that was accomplished by student organizations in Maine is, frankly, astounding. The enthusiasm and relentlessness of the campus and community campaigns for "No on 1" should be encouraging because the vote was so close and anything but a nail in the coffin of hope for marriage equality. In Maine, voters can bring referenda back to the ballot, and the contentiousness of Question 1 suggests that it will return in the future.

Who knows -- maybe by then Obama will have ended his silence on the issue of gay marriage and endorse its passage. Maybe Mainers will have elected a more popular governor whose backing will carry more weight. Maybe voters will have tired of the rehashed and fear-mongering claims that marriage equality leads to the schools' teaching of a homosexual lifestyle, which otherwise "normal" young students could contract like a bad case of swine flu. (Were support for gay marriage contagious, Maine would have caught it from the rest of New England and Canada.)

Until then, the job of the student activist should be to hold onto and work to expand the core voters -- southern Mainers and college students -- she so successfully wooed for the election. The lesson of Prop 8 was the importance of high turnout among the voting base. To lose them – and be forced to start over – would be catastrophic.