This post was submitted by Nathan Tabak.

We lost in Maine.

We lost despite having a significant fundraising advantage over our opponents.  We lost despite turnout that far exceeded most expectations—something which the conventional wisdom held would be a huge boon for our side.  We lost despite campaigning in a liberal state—one that, on the same day, overwhelmingly approved a referendum allowing medical marijuana.  And, most heartbreakingly for me, despite all the hard work that countless people put into the campaign.

I was one of them.  As I’ve previously written, in October I traveled from Washington, DC to Portland as part of the Volunteer Vacation program. After arriving, I was stationed near Bangor for about a week, where I engaged in intensive volunteer recruitment, phonebanking, and canvassing.  And during that time, I got a sense of what the No on 1 campaign was about.

It was about the straight, middle-aged volunteer I met on my first day in Portland, who choked up audibly when he described his daughter’s eloquent defense of marriage equality in words borrowed from Walt Whitman.

It was about the pair of activists I met from California, who told me about how they responded with tears and outrage last November after the passage of Proposition 8, and who came to Maine to prevent a redux of that hateful and reprehensible amendment.

It was about the straight boy who led his campus’ No on 1 effort, leading canvassing session after canvassing session and phonebank after phonebank out of his sense of social justice.

But we lost.  And in the end, the compassion shown by so many of my straight allies on the campaign, and by many of the Mainers whom I met while recruiting or canvassing, proved to be tragically unrepresentative of the state as a whole.

Maybe, after the twin successes of Proposition 8 and Question 1, it’s fair to conclude that the ballot box is a dead end for marriage equality for now—that the tyranny of the majority will crush us in any state where a marriage referendum can be put on the ballot.  Perhaps we ought to focus solely on the courts, and on achieving a federal-level solution there, or on getting Congress to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

But while we debate political strategy in the wake of our defeats, one thing is clear: Victory for same-sex marriage is inevitable.  Younger voters, according to most polls and in nearly every recent election, back marriage equality in far greater numbers than their parents.  Society is slowly turning in the direction of equality.  On the same night that Question 1 passed, Washington voters approved an “everything but marriage” domestic partnership law whose passage would have been unthinkable only ten or fifteen years ago.

Equality is the future, and we get closer to it with every passing day.  Its face is that of the 17-year-old high school senior who flew in from Colorado to work with us, and the 9-year-old boy who did multiple phonebanking shifts in the local campaign office.  They represent everything we’re fighting for, and I’ll never lose sight of that fact—and I don’t think any of my fellow No on 1 volunteers will, either.