Same-Sex Marriage up for a Vote?

The Massachusetts legislature votes today, or perhaps doesn't, on that no-more-gay-marryin' amendment (summary: it needs a quarter of the combined legislature to approve it this session and next, then a majority in a popular ballot; more than a quarter of the legislature would certainly vote for it, but more than half would vote against, so they may just kill it by running out the clock on the session, which ends today). I've got the usual mixed feelings, none original:

• I despise the amendment, so hope it fails one way or another.
• On the other hand, just letting the thing die without voting does seem sort of shabby. The Supreme Judicial Court certainly thinks so; that opinion is a nice mix of outrage and impotence.
  
• On another hand, state constitutional amendments are too damned easy to get passed. I distrust anything that reeks of ballot initiatives, and like to see them confounded.
  
• But then, my guess is that the amendment would fail the popular vote.
  
• There's also the argument that civil rights should not be subject to vote. That is both sincere and true, but not very persuasive, except maybe to waffly legislators trying to cover their asses today (I mean both "waffly" and "covering their asses" in a positive way here). Obviously no one who would vote for the thing thinks SSM is a civil right. Or, for that matter, that "gay" and "civil rights" are compatible concepts.
  
• Eventually the whole thing will be moot. In thirty years a lot of states anti-same-sex-marriage amendments are going to end up getting repealed, as today's high school students (to whom, in my limited experience, the legitimacy of gay marriage is a no-brainer) find themselves in charge of things.