My wife and I voted against Prop 8, and we contributed money against Prop 8. We still hope that it will be overruled by the CA Supreme Court (and there are some grounds for such a ruling), but it's not a sure thing either way.
I could support having CA get out of the marriage business altogether and just sanction civil unions. As a practical matter, though I doubt that it would happen. I can just imagine the furor over "How dare you tell me we're not married!" While I could be wrong about this, let's assume for the moment that there is no practical way in the short term to do away with state sanctioned marriage.
Assuming that the appeal to the CA Supremes loses, the right thing for those of us who believe that gays have equal rights is to push for the next round of amendment propositions. We can lose, of course, but then we go back and file it again. And again. And again.
It is worth pointing out that Prop 22 (the last anti gay marriage prop before Prop 8) passed in 2000 with 61.4% approval. Prop 8, with essentially the same language, but as an amendment, passed with only abut 52% approval. That's a 9% decline in 8 years. The next time around we might be able to pass a "no discrimination" marriage prop.
There has been the suggestion that Obama's win in CA brought out enough new black (or black and latino) voters to pass Prop 8. If you ignore the rest of the electorate this might have some merit. But exit polls indicate that 62% of new voters (all races) voted against Prop 8. So the most likely Obama effect overall is to have narrowed the margin.
Of more interest is the age demographic. Exit polls (
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#CAI01p1) suggest that the vote is strongly age correlated, with 61% of voters under age 30 voting against Prop 8. As every year passes we lose (roughly) 5% of those voters over 65 (61% voted for Prop 8). To be sure, they are replaced, but if the attitudes towards gay marriage remain reasonably stable then eventually the electorate will decide that gays should not be outcasts.
Also see
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/ ... myths.html