The question came up during an appearance by David Gergen at Roger Williams University last week. A student expressed her happiness at the election of Barack Obama and, at the same time, her disappointment over the vote in California to rescind the right of gays to marry.

It was an emotional mix felt by a lot of people after the election — joy over Obama’s victory and deep disappointment over the anti-gay vote in California.

Gergen, who was speaking at Roger Williams about the election, said he thinks equal rights for gays will come but the struggle will be long and there will be setbacks. His was an interesting take on the question since he admittedly has moved from one side of the issue to the other.

Gergen is the man who wrote President Nixon’s one-sentence resignation letter. He has worked for four presidents — Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. He has seen government work and not work. He is now a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a political analyst on CNN.

And he thinks full rights for gays is something that has to happen because it is the right thing. He told the large audience in Bristol that it is the new civil rights struggle.

It remains a very simple proposition: Approve gay marriage and all the rights that go with it and make life better for tens of thousands of people — and do absolutely no harm to heterosexual marriage or the social fabric of a community.

One need only look next door. Massachusetts has allowed gay marriage for five years. The sky hasn’t fallen. Loving couples have remained loving couples. Marriage has remained a matter of love and commitment.

It’s been the same in California and it will be the same in Connecticut.

But some people see gay marriage as cause for a bizarre moral turf battle. It threatens them. It threatens the tightly defined place they have carved out for themselves. It is an idea they have no room for. Yet none of the opponents to marriage equality has been able to come up with a clear, articulate explanation of the damage it does. That might be because it does no damage. It simply allows strong relationships to flourish under legal recognition.

Still, opponents won one in California on Nov. 4. Resources flooded down on the state from the moral high ground and Californians voted to restore discrimination.

“It seemed we got everything else right that night and then someone let the air out of the balloon,” says David McPhail, who lives with his boyfriend in Cranston. They have been together for five years.

“We would love to get married,” he says. “And it would be much easier for us to buy a house in Massachusetts. But this is our home. We want to make things better here.”

Last Saturday, about 500 people who want to make things better here gathered in the rain at the State House in Providence. They gathered to protest the vote in California and to call on Rhode Island lawmakers to make gay marriage the law.

It will happen eventually. There will probably come a day few of us will see when people will look back and wonder how a good and fair country could possibly have shut out so many people from full and equal rights for so long.

One sign at Saturday’s rally had a map of Connecticut and Massachusetts, colored in blue, and Rhode Island, colored in red with the inscription “Join the free states.”

Well said. Join up as soon as possible. Be fair.

bkerr@projo.com