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Here we see ebullient supports of anti-gay discrimination beaming with delight at having set back marriage equality in Maine. Now, I too get euphoric over victory. You work so hard, you win, you’re happy. I’ve been known to crow over a win at Yatzhee! But what, exactly, are they celebrating beyond the fact of the triumph itself? That gay marriages won’t be taught in school? That their own marriages won’t be challenged by something they’re not comfortable with? Yes — that, and more.

What lies at the heart of this last stand against full equality for gay and lesbian citizens is a lingering sense that we never should have come out. No one in 2009  is so unsophisticated as to repeat Anita Bryant’s dictum from the first round of the gay rights wars that “We wish you’d all just go back into the closet,” but their circumlocutions don’t effectively disguise an identical view. It’s most obvious in the one effective scare tactic remaining to them — the effort to invoke the indoctrination of innocent children. “Gay marriage will be taught in schools! It’s supposed to be unspeakable.”

But whether or not a state recognizes civil unions, same-sex marriages, domestic partnerships, or none of the above, in fact many classes will contain the kids of same-sex couples. And, marriage equality or no, many practical educators will use the diversity before them — including single parents, kids raised by other relatives, or adopted, or in foster care, or…. — to teach their students about respect for all families.

In so doing, they are also seeding the ground for kids who are from traditional families but who might happen to be gay. Whatever’s taught in the home, if kids hear in school and other social settings that families are of all sorts and stripes, including gay, they might be expected to suffer less trauma when they assay that leap of faith across the chasm, joining the community of supportive gays on the other side. Little of this seems to have occurred to equality opponents, who have found an effective political bludgeon, and are willing to gamble that none of their kids will turn out gay.

There’s something else at work, too. Consider this excerpt from Lisa Belkin’s article to be published in this Sunday’s Times, where she summarizes studies done on the children of same-sex (mostly lesbian)  parents. After noting that such kids do just as well as children raised by heterosexual  parents, she says:

More enlightening than the similarities, however, are the differences, the most striking of which is that these children tend to be less conventional and more flexible when it comes to gender roles and assumptions than those raised in more traditional families.

There are data that show, for instance, that daughters of lesbian mothers are more likely to aspire to professions that are traditionally considered male, like doctors or lawyers — 52 percent in one study said that was their goal, compared with 21 percent of daughters of heterosexual mothers, who are still more likely to say they want to be nurses or teachers when they grow up. (The same study found that 95 percent of boys from both types of families choose the more masculine jobs.) Girls raised by lesbians are also more likely to engage in “roughhousing” and to play with “male-gendered-type toys” than girls raised by straight mothers. And adult children of gay parents appear more likely than the average adult to work in the fields of social justice and to have more gay friends in their social mix.

Heterosexual couples might want to pay attention to these results. While the gay-marriage debate is playing out on the public stage, a more private debate is taking place in kitchens and bedrooms over who does what in a heterosexual marriage (takes out the trash, spends more time with the kids, feels free to head out with their friends for a beer). The philosophical underpinnings of both conversations — gay marriage and equality in parenting — are similar, in that both focus on equality for adults (in the case of heterosexuals, mostly wives). But even if parents who seek parity do so for their own sanity and in pursuit of their own ideals, might it not also be better for their children?

Yes, if less conventional, more tolerant children are your goal. Because if the children of gays and lesbians are different, it is presumably related to the way they were raised — by parents with a view of domestic roles that differs from most of their heterosexual peers.

In sum,  according to Belkin: “Same-sex couples, it seems, are less likely to impose certain gender-based expectations on their children.”

Perhaps, at root, that’s what the strongest opponents of equality most fear.