Statement from Ellen DeGeneres
Host, “The Ellen DeGeneres Show“

Watching the returns on election night was an amazing experience. Barack Obama is our new president. Change is here.  I, like millions of Americans, felt like we had taken a giant step towards equality.  We were watching history.

This morning, when it was clear that Proposition 8 had passed in California, I can’t explain the feeling I had.  I was saddened beyond belief.  Here we just had a giant step towards equality and then on the very next day, we took a giant step away.

I believe one day a “ban on gay marriage” will sound totally ridiculous.  In the meantime, I will continue to speak out for equality for all of us.

Matt Coles
ACLU Director of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Project

After the California Supreme Court’s brilliant, inspiring decision in May, Tuesday’s loss at the polls is a bitter pill. That it follows all the wonderful stories of people getting married, and the Connecticut decision that seemed to put us on a roll, makes it all the more difficult to accept.

But indulge me for a look back in history. In 1982, we passed a domestic partnership law in San Francisco, the country’s first. Despite having carefully laid the groundwork, it was vetoed without warning, and a vote essential to an override defected the next day. It took us seven years to get it passed again. And when we did, our opponents got enough signatures to put it on the ballot in 30 days. We ran one of the most expensive local initiative elections in California history. And we lost, 50.5 to 49.5. In 1990, we put it back on the ballot again and won. But the next year, we had to defend it again against an attempted repeal initiative.

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David Gergen
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Political Analyst

I went back to look at the last speech that Martin Luther King gave in 1968, the day before he was assassinated.

King said, “I just want to do God’s will. He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain and I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the promise land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight we as a people will get to the promise land.”

It seems to me that for an awful lot of people in this country, especially for African Americans, Barack Obama has said that he’s part of the Joshua Generation. Martin Luther King was our Moses. We haven’t ended our prejudice, but there’s something about this evening and election that has made an awful lot of people feel this is the Joshua Generation, we can do something we thought we could never reach 30, 40, 50 years ago.

Supporters of Proposition 8, which would ban same sex marriage in California, wait for results at a party in Sacramento.

Editor’s Note: You can read more Lisa Bloom blogs on “In Session”

Lisa Bloom
AC360° Contributor
In Session Anchor

YES WE DID!, I wrote in giant letters on my Facebook page on election night, tears in my eyes as I watched Barack Obama’s inspiring acceptance speech. Every moment of it was so moving. And when I heard my African-American friends talk about the symbolism of this day, that they can look into their children’s eyes and honestly say that we are all now truly equal – well, as a lifelong civil rights activist, I thought, it has happened. We shall overcome, not someday, but today.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said the night before he was assassinated, “And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.” Hallelujah, I thought, we have arrived. Free at last, free at last.

Then I remembered my gay friends, who faced ugly ballot measures in four states. The California Supreme Court just last May issued a landmark ruling that gay people were entitled to equal marriage rights. My mother, Gloria Allred, was one of the lead attorneys in that case. I remembered Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons, together for 55 years, who were the first couple married after that decision, one in a wheelchair, the other walking slowly to the altar. “At our age,” they said, “we don’t have the luxury of time.” I remembered that on the day of that decision, citizens of San Francisco’s Castro District took down their rainbow flags and flew American flags. “For the first time in my life,” they told me, “I feel like a full citizen. I can tell my children that in the eyes of the law I am just as worthy as anyone else.” I remembered riding in Santa Monica’s gay pride parade alongside my mother in June, getting mobbed by thousands of ordinary people who were grateful that she had won for them the extraordinary privilege of simple respect.
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T.D. Jakes
Time.com

The African slaves who provided most of the labor that built the White House never imagined that a black man would ever own embossed stationery that read “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” Even the dreamer himself, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., might not have imagined that 40 short years after his murder, we would be planning an Inauguration of the first man of African descent to ascend to the presidency.

No minority of any ethnicity had ever looked beyond the scarce representation of a few Senators and seen anything that suggested that the doorknob of the Oval Office could be opened by anything other than the hand of a middle-aged white male.

One of the youngest Presidents in the history of our nation will bring new shades to the canvas of white leaders who came before his unprecedented political career. Senator Barack Obama has proved to be a biracial icon who can mobilize blacks and whites alike. Perhaps his mixed parentage gave him the multicultural background needed to be culturally bilingual, creating the dialogue that may bridge our divide.

Our national demographic has metamorphosed into a darker-hued population, which is changing how America plans for the future. The cultural dialogue and language are changing. Political parties, churches and corporations must rethink how we go forward and with whose needs in mind. Without question, Obama’s Administration will reshape the good-ole-boys’ club we have seen for centuries, altering the political terrain, and it may very well spawn new hope for the disenfranchised.

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Keith Woods | Bio
Dean of Faculty at the Poynter Institute

We have no real experience at this as a nation. We know the American race story that begins in strife, oppression, struggle. We know the one that ends in marching and overcoming. We know it well. Throughout our history, we have talked about race relations only on the heels of injustice and unrest. We ruminate over our failures and measure success always as rising above the strife; the oppression; the struggle.

How do we talk about race when we’ve succeeded not in spite of our choices, but because of them?

It’s true that Sen. Barack Obama, apparently on the brink of becoming the first black American to win the presidency, stands on the shoulders of giants. The men and women who fought against the chains of slavery, the lynching rope, Jim Crow’s restrictions or the real and imagined residuals of engrained bigotry now buttress his gangly legs and wispy body. It feels racially treasonous to even consider talking of Obama’s historic run without exhuming that past.

Yet we are invited now to a conversation about a victory in which racism was at best only the equal of other obstacles, and may prove to have been smaller still. We are not compelled to the discussion because of what the racists did to Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis or what the police did to Rodney King in Los Angeles. We are not again asking the rhetorical and disingenuous question, “What does this say about race relations?” after the justice system or a corporate board or football team or some other piece of our social and cultural core let us down once again. What happens if, this time, voters from every racial and ethnic corner of the country chose the black man?

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CNN’s John King reports on the increasing power of Latino voters and the efforts to mobilize their vote.

CNN’s John King looks at whether the Bradley effect is fact or fiction.