There’s been a lot of talk about who won what seat in Congress, and then there’s the entire President-elect Obama thing that everyone seems to pay attention to.

But the fact remains, for every person who wins, there is a person who loses. This losing person is rarely talked about, and after they give their concession speech, they are forgotten about. Think John Kerry or Bob Dole.

Indeed, for every winner there has to be a loser, and I am such a case.

For the past few months, I have been taking a leave of absence from my column-writing business to work on defeating Proposition 102.

Proposition 102 was the so-called marriage amendment which basically took Arizona’s state law defining marriage as being between one man and one woman and put it into our state constitution.

As a gay man, I am offended that we have even spent a second debating this. But the fact of the matter is, it passed.

In fact, it passed everywhere. Florida and California both had marriage amendments on their ballots, and both of theirs passed. For many California residents who recently got married, their marriages are now no longer recognized by the state. This sounds fairly understandable to me: If you hate gay people, you would most certainly want to give them rights, and then take them away like your older sibling did with candy before pushing you into the sand.

Regardless, in one single night, three states added to their state constitutions a very clear message: We hate gay people.

I ran into one girl who I went to high school with a few weeks ago while attempting to pass out an obscene number of pamphlets regarding Proposition 102. I knew she was conservative, and when I saw her, she said she loves me as a person but would be voting in favor of Proposition 102 because of “religion reasons.”

But the fact of the matter is, she — like 56 percent of Arizonans — do not love me as a person. I cannot get married in three more states in the nation that is supposed to be the freest nation. We were founded on the idea that every man is created equal. But history has shown that that principle isn’t true, however — especially if you’re black, a woman or gay.

This election has given us the very best, with the newly elected black president and the not-quite-elected female vice presidential candidate.

But there are no more gay marriages happening on this side of the Mississippi. And there won’t be for a very long time.

This past semester, we’ve seen a plethora of letters to the editor about homosexuality. We’ve seen dozens of letters about how we gays are sinners. And that’s fine. I have a tough hide and can hack it.

In fact, I can even hack these damn marriage bans that keep getting put on ballots, even after Arizona voted it down in 2006 and it’s on the ballot questionably.

But I cannot handle the thought of the 15-year-old boy who is so scared of his friends or family finding out he’s gay that he gets his father’s gun after school one day and shoots himself in the head.

I cannot handle the thought that while we are debating gay marriage, the 13-year-old girl, who, while watching the news her mother flipped on, hears about how horrible these feelings she has for a girl in her class are before she takes five, six, seven pills stolen from her parent’s medicine cabinet and is found dead in her bed the next morning.

I cannot handle the thought that gay teens are at least two times more likely to commit suicide (and some studies even put that number at eight times more likely) than other teens.

I cannot handle the thought while we debate gay marriage, we are sending a terrible message to our kids. Because while we want to believe that our blatant discrimination ends with marriage, we know it isn’t the truth. Arkansas just passed a gay-adoption ban to prove it.

So the real question is; What’s next?

Ray Ceo Jr. feels hated. To send hate mail, e-mail him at raymond.ceo@asu.edu.