In late 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Court threw the political world a curveball when it ruled that gay couples should be able to get legally married. At the time, as Paul Waldman recently noted, “Republican politicians tripped over each other to predict the demise of American civilization if the marriage equality outbreak were not contained, and Democrats tugged at their collars and tried to explain their nuanced and complicated positions on the issue.”
More than four years later, the landscape has changed quite a bit. The Republican brand is in the toilet, and public concerns over the economy and the war in Iraq dominate the political discussion. It’s against this backdrop that the California Supreme Court ruled as its Massachusetts brethren did, only this time, few outside the religious right seem to care.
Today, the Politico’s David Paul Kuhn argues that we shouldn’t be fooled, and that the gay marriage issue “may yet return to center stage in the presidential election this fall.”
“There is no reason to think [gay marriage] should be less potent of an issue in 2008 than in 2004,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “It is an issue that could cause further problems with those voters whom Obama is already having trouble — white working class voters.” […]
This year, social conservatives are again pushing to turn same-sex marriage into a hot-button social issue. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins hosted a panel in Washington Thursday on “the national implications of the [California] ruling and on the plans to repel this assault on marriage and the family.”
Perkins was joined by Ken Blackwell, who served as Ohio’s secretary of state in 2004. Ohio was one of 11 states to pass a same-sex marriage ban that year. This year, it’s possible that two of the most populous states — Florida and California — could have same-sex marriage measures on the ballot in November.
I remain skeptical. In 2004, Bush pandered shamelessly, convincing the base he really cared about whether gay people could get married, and working the far right into a frenzy. In 2008, Bush isn’t talking about this, McCain isn’t talking about this, GOP leaders in Congress are trying not to talk about this, and even the religious right isn’t shouting especially loud over this.
Given the challenges a lot of Americans are facing in their daily lives, and the fact that gay marriage has been around for a couple of years without a resulting apocalypse, it seems like most of the electorate is just too exhausted for a culture war.
In Waldman’s piece, he argues that it’s more than just exhaustion — straight Americans’ animus towards gay Americans just ain’t what it used to be.
It has been four and a half years since same-sex marriages were legalized in Massachusetts, and for some reason the Bay State has not descended into a perverted bacchanal, families have not been torn asunder by the destructive power of these new unions, and the bonds holding society together have not been torn to shreds. Incredibly, the prophecies of doom were wrong.
In 2004, there were ballot initiatives outlawing gay marriage in 11 states. All succeeded easily. In 2006, there were eight more. But this time, one of them — Arizona’s — actually failed (despite John McCain’s efforts). There is still time for initiatives to be put on the 2008 ballot, but they will likely have a much more difficult time.
With each passing year, straight Americans become more and more comfortable with gay Americans. This doesn’t mean their opinions on marriage are going to be transformed overnight, but it does mean that they will be less susceptible to scare tactics.
In 1986, the Supreme Court upheld laws banning sodomy (almost never enforced against straight sodomites) in Bowers v. Hardwick. Justice Lewis Powell, who voted with the majority in Bowers, told a law clerk at the time, “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a homosexual.” What he didn’t know was that the clerk to whom he was speaking was gay. Powell later admitted that he regretted his vote in Bowers, and the Court overturned the decision in 2003. There are certainly some Americans who could say today what Powell did two decades ago, but the number gets smaller every year.
More than a few conservatives will acknowledge in private that they’ve effectively lost the fight over same-sex marriage. Whatever the outcome of November’s ballot initiative in California, civil union laws will continue to be passed state by state and will eventually be followed by laws granting full marriage rights. This will happen first in the more progressive states, then in the “purple” states of the Midwest and Southwest, and finally in the rest of country, with the conservative strongholds of the South bringing up the rear. How long it will take is hard to say, but it will happen.
In some ways, the arc towards justice has already begun. All of the Democratic presidential candidates announced early on that they oppose “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which would have been very unlikely as recently as a campaign cycle or two ago. All of the Democratic presidential candidate openly support civil unions, and the Republican presidential candidate (though he’s changed his mind dramatically on more than one occasion) has said he support some legal recognition of gay relationships.
All of this was hard to imagine up until fairly recently. And given this, I find it hard to imagine that anti-gay demagoguery will be as potent this year as it was in the past.