Gay Community Has Best Election Night Ever

LGBT community wins big on marriage equality, gets first openly gay U.S. Senator

While Americans were sending their first African American president, Barack Obama, back to the White House for four more years, voters in four states were delivering a huge victory to gay and lesbians couples who want the right to legally tie the knot.

As of Wednesday morning, same sex marriage was legally sanctioned by voters in Maine and Maryland, and voters were narrowly approving it in Washington state. Minnesota voters rejected a ballot measure that would have imposed a ban on such unions, although couples there still do not have the right to wed.

Gay rights advocacy groups were heralding the historic news, thought not so long ago to be highly improbable through the electoral process, while also reelecting Obama, who is the first sitting U.S. president to endorse gay marriage.

“Years from now we’ll remember this election day as the most important and most historic, in the history of the LGBT movement,” Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a video statement recorded Tuesday night.

HRC, a prominent American gay and lesbian civil rights group, spent two years raising $20 million and mobilizing its largest ever marriage equality campaign.

“We have won a landslide victory for equality at the ballot box,” Griffin declared.

Herndon Graddick, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, gave some of the credit to President Obama.