As I Live and Breathe, It's Philadelphia Freedom

Dark blue states have marriage equality. Green states allow same-sex civil unions. Light blue states were carried by Obama but do not recognize gay relationships.  All of the red states were carried by Romney. At this moment, none have marriage equality or civil unions.

Yesterday I finally got around to updating my marriage equality map.  I did this primarily because Oregon had decided not to appeal a federal court decision to overturn that state's constitutional prohibition of gay marriages.  I fully expected the opposite outcome in Pennsylvania but today was pleasantly surprised to see that I was wrong.  The Republican governor of Pennsylvania announced  that he would not appeal the decision because such an appeal would be "extremely unlikely to succeed."

So that moves Pennsylvania to the dark blue on our chart. It is the nineteenth state to adopt full marriage equality.  At this moment, the nineteen states with full marriage equality have a total of  231 electoral votes.  If you add in the three states with other forms of legal recognition, those states have 256 electoral votes.  But there are nearly a dozen other states where the ban on gay marriages have been overturned by a judge. One such state is Michigan, the only state where Barack Obama got greater than 51% of the vote in 2012 that doesn't have at least some legal recognition of gay relationships.  Add just Michigan to the mix, and we will have a majority of states that recognize gay couples.  Add the other swing states like Virginia and Ohio and we sail past 300.  

The court battles will rattle around for several months at a minimum.  But the path is clear and we are beyond the point of no return.  Marriage equality is coming.