Some years, there are more of one than the other, but every year is a mixed bag. This year, the toughest loss for me was the decision by the voters of Maine to (narrowly) overturn the legislature's legalization of same-sex marriage.

As a strong supporter of same-sex marriage, I was disappointed with the outcome. But as I watched the final results came in, I found myself feeling disquiet beyond that usually elicited by being on the short end of a vote. Something seemed fundamentally wrong to me about the process itself.

At first, I thought my unease was caused by my general antipathy to government by referendum. I believe we should elect people whose judgment we trust and assign to them the full-time task of participating in the debates and coming to the best solution.

THIS SEEMS to me far preferable to distilling complex issues down to one line on a ballot, to be decided in a moment, with no study, by people who often came to vote for things unrelated to that issue.

A referendum also makes compromise, one of the most important legislative functions, impossible. If I see a ballot initiative asking if I want to spend $10 million on education, I may think that's too high. But I could support $5 million. In the legislative process, that lower figure might actually be the final product. In a referendum, it's all or nothing, guaranteeing results that up to 49.9 percent of the population may never buy into.

Finally, voters don't have to square the circle. For example, in states with referendums, voters routinely vote to cut their taxes and increase spending on services they like. Unlike the legislature, voters don't have to make it all add up, which can lead to budgetary disaster.

Yet, as I thought it through, I found my concerns went deeper.

There is something profoundly wrong about putting the basic human rights of a minority up to a vote of the majority. Rights are rights, whether or not the majority agrees with them. And while there may be an argument (even a weak one) for voting on a given tax, or whether to build a highway, individual rights belong to the individual, not 50.1 percent of the community.

Should we put which god you can pray to up to a vote?

How about whether a person has the right to advocate a certain position on an issue, or whether he or she have a right to remain silent if arrested?

Maybe we could vote on what books can be read, or whether married couples can use contraception? Most of us would recoil from such suggestions.

We can examine recent history to see how such votes might go. Fifty years ago, if we had put desegregating public schools up to a vote in the South - or much of the North, for that matter - would it have passed? How about allowing African-Americans to drink out of whites-only water fountains?

Even in the context of marriage, at one time a vote on whether you could marry outside your race would have lost overwhelmingly in much of the country. In some places, it might still lose today.

So what troubles me is that it seems incongruent, and, frankly, a little icky, to have majorities decide whether a minority is entitled to their human rights. It would be like having white people vote on whether black people could sit in the front of the bus, or having Christians vote on whether Muslims can pray publicly. I'd like to think that, today, those votes would go well. Even so, it still wouldn't feel like the right thing to do.

It's estimated that 3 percent of those in Maine are gay. So 97 percent of the people, whose own lives are utterly unaffected by the status of same-sex marriage, got to give thumbs up or down on someone else's marriage.

Marriage was called by the Supreme Court "fundamental to our very existence." Yet gay people are denied the right to marry because a slim majority of straight people don't feel like giving it to them. That process, more than the result, should make all of us, and our spouses, lose some sleep tonight.

State Sen. Daylin Leach is a Montgomery County Democrat.