Here's your post-election Religion News Roundup excerpt for today.

c. Religion News Service 2012
Reprinted with permission

By Kevin Eckstrom
Religion News Service

It's the morning after the night before, and here's our sense of who won and who lost last night (also be sure to check out Mark Silk's first take on Election 2012):

WINNERS

Hawaii: The state that gave us our first black president is now sending the first Buddhist (and first Asian-American woman) to the U.S. Senate, Mazie Hirono, and the first Hindu to the House, Tulsi Gabbard. Both are Democrats. Here's our pre-election preview of Gabbard.

Roy Moore: The combative "Ten Commandments" judge who lost his seat as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2003 for refusing to remove his 5,200-pound granite monument will return to the same office, winning 52 percent of the vote.

Mormons: Even though Mitt Romney will remain the first Mormon nominee and not the first Mormon president, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints survived intact, making inroads with evangelicals (Billy Graham!) and emerging relatively unscathed. Saith respected Mormon scribe Peggy Fletcher Stack: "Romney’s run did alter some views: He won nearly the entire Bible Belt, dominated by evangelical Christians who long have been suspicious of Mormonism and critical of LDS theology." 

Elizabeth Warren: The take-no-prisoners consumer advocate and Harvard professor reclaimed Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in Massachusetts from Scott Brown, 54 to 46 percent. While Warren wasn't a religious candidate per se, she framed her fight for the middle class and against Wall Street in starkly moral terms -- a winning formula that Democrats will be looking to replicate elsewhere.

Nuns on the Bus: The socially justice-minded Nuns on the Bus never endorsed President Obama in so many words, but they certainly came out strongly against fellow Catholic Paul Ryan and his GOP budget. At the end of the day, Catholic voters seemed to side with the nuns' and Joe Biden's we're-all-in-this-together version of Catholic social justice teaching over Ryan's go-it-alone social gospel inspired by Ayn Rand.

Gay marriage: For the first time ever, gay marriage won at the ballot box, in Maine, Maryland and Minnesota. It may well yet win in Washington state. What's different this time: in Maryland and Washington (and, in a backwards way, Maine), voters reaffirmed the state legislature's support of gay marriage. Minnesota's notable because it's the first time voters rejected a state constitutional amendment to keep gays and lesbians from getting married. Southern Baptist Al Mohler tweeted it as "a fundamental moral realignment of the country."

To read the rest of the winners and losers from the Tuesday elections, read the rest of this column on Religion News Service.