But California won't let it go. The whining is enough to make a soccer player envious. Lawyers are headed to court to block the proposition. Others are demanding that the vote go back on the ballot in 2010. Proponents of Prop. 8 are being singled out for abuse by opponents.

Sore losing is having a field day.

Evan Wolfson, a California-based gay-rights lawyer who heads a group called Freedom to Marry, said, "There's something deeply wrong with putting the rights of a minority up to a majority vote. If this were being done to almost any other minority, people would see how un-American this is."

Polygamists of the 19th century might have something to say about that. And a thousand other minorities you could name who have had to fall in step with the majority.

How are you supposed to decide stuff? Rock-paper-scissors? Duel at dawn?

Wolfson sees the amendment(s) in terms of discrimination against gays who want to be married while not seeing that the absence of such marriage amendments would be discrimination against not only those who prefer marriage to be defined between one man and one woman, but against untold numbers of children whose world would be greatly changed as a result.

And that's a minority that can't even vote.

You can't have it both ways. Those voters in favor of the amendments aren't voting against gay rights, they're voting for a marriage tradition as America, and America's children, have long known it.

Voting for it in huge numbers, in fact.

Everyone seems to get that but California.

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Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.