Supporters of gay marriage can read poll results as well as opponents of the idea -- and the despair of the former is exceeded only by the jubilation of the latter. On Election Day, amendments banning gay marriage were overwhelmingly approved in 11 states and a similar move to amend the U.S. Constitution appears to have new life.

This is a bad idea whose time appears to have come. Although many explanations can be offered for Sen. John Kerry's defeat, the gay-marriage issue was high among the "moral values" that concerned conservative voters, perhaps decisively so in key states such as Ohio.

Given the political damage, Democrats could easily be tempted to abandon gay Americans in the hope that the party can better connect to voters in the nation's heartland.

As it was, Mr. Kerry was not personally in favor of gay marriage but he did not support a federal constitutional amendment against it either, a nuanced position that got him nowhere. Nor would any presidential candidate of the presumptively liberal Democratic Party be given credit by those who have convinced themselves that the Republican Party is God's agent on Earth.

In truth, abandoning an important principle is not an option, merely a strategy for long-term loss of credibility. Once down that road, the party might just as well jettison any concern for minorities and low-paid workers. Clearly, the old bigotry against homosexuals has not abated, but it sells the American people short to think that basic notions of fairness will not eventually succeed.

In some of the states that passed anti-gay amendments Nov. 2, laws existed until relatively recently that prohibited marriages between men and women of different races, with the "sin" of miscegenation also denounced in biblical terms. Eventually, people realized that morality posing as prejudice was not in fact moral.

It is all too easy to pass laws that give a large comfortable group the sanctimonious pleasure of dictating to a historically hated smaller one, but the unfairness eventually becomes too much. Such overreach was present in this go-around: While amendments in Mississippi, Montana and Oregon were restricted to gay marriage (as is the proposed federal amendment), those in Arkansas, Georgia. Kentucky. Michigan. North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio and Utah also banned gay civil unions.

What is wrong with this was eloquently expressed by Andrew Sullivan in an online commentary: "In eight more states now, gay couples have no relationship rights at all. Their legal ability to visit a spouse in a hospital, to pass on property, to have legal protections for their children, has been gutted. If you are a gay couple living in Alabama, you know one thing: Your family has no standing under the law, and it can and will be violated by strangers."

Despair is premature, though. It may take some time, but such fundamental unfairness will one day be seen for what it is: immoral and un-American.