Terribly, the ones defending the dignity and sanctity of human life. Victorious, the ones upholding the sanctity of marriage.

Abortion bans lost. Traditional marriage definitions won. It’s a patchwork.

One of the highest profile ballot measures was California’s Proposition 8. It finally passed.

California voters overturned same-sex marriage rights in
a vote that stands to affect how the issue plays out elsewhere in the
nation…

The approval marks a stunning upset in a $70 million campaign that
just weeks ago looked to be running in favor of preserving gay marriage
rights.

The passage of Prop 8, as it is known, would be a major
victory for religious conservatives seeking to ban gay marriage in
other states, and a crippling setback for the gay rights movement
nationwide.

Choice wording in that piece.

But the part about the “stunning upset in a $70 million campaign” is
key to why other state initiatives on social moral values were
rejected. So much big money was poured into their defeat.

Like South Dakota’s abortion ban defining abortion as the termination of a ’whole, separate, unique, living human being’. And Colorado’s amendment to define the life of a human being as beginning at conception.

In Washington state, the assisted suicide initiative passed. Regrettably.

Voters approved Initiative 1000 on Tuesday, making
Washington the second state to give terminally ill people the option of
medically assisted suicide.

The ballot measure, patterned after Oregon’s “Death with Dignity”
law, allows a terminally ill person to be prescribed lethal medication,
which would be self-administered…

Supporters, led publicly by Democratic former Gov. Booth
Gardner, said the initiative would provide a compassionate way for
terminally ill people to die.

Look at the deceptive language. “Death with Dignity”. Providing “a compassionate way” to help people die.

The Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation has plenty to say about the insidious language that there is “dignity” in ending life unnaturally. So does Dr. Mark Mostert.

But here’s what the pro-death crowd don’t want you to know:

This is how things started in the Netherlands – compassion, dignity,
and all. No slippery slope? In a very few short years, the Netherlands
moved from euthanasia for a very, very few under very specific
circumstances, to now being a country where euthanasia and assisted
suicide are available for almost everyone for almost any reason.

Many elderly Dutch people now fear being admitted to a hospital, and
with good reason: Holland now routinely euthanizes people who never
even asked for euthanasia or wanted to die. Many elderly people in the
Netherlands feel that their culture of death puts a lot of pressure on
them to assume a duty to die - whether they want to or not.

And Wesley J. Smith.

In the last several years they moved the
euthanasia/assisted suicide movement in this country away from the
crackpot model…and into what I call the professional model, in which
very well tailored, upper middle class or rich activists network with
other well tailored, upper middle class or rich professional types, to
move the agenda forward–in elections, in the courts, in legislatures,
before organizations and media to obtain endorsements, etc.

Meanwhile, the opposition is generally starved for funds,
marginalized in the popular media, and as a consequence, always stuck
in reactive mode when we need to be proactive.

That’s the story behind each of these defeats.

The world may be largely celebrating the victory of a very liberal American president.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown called Tuesday’s poll historic and said he and Mr Obama “share many values”.

But the pro-life world is rallying to call for the defense of universally shared values.