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Wednesday, 25 June 2008 19:27
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 Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage Fades
By William Butte
Consider this: At the very moment you're reading these words, thousands of same-sex couples are traveling across America to California to do what hundreds of same-sex couples throughout the Golden State are doing right this second: They're getting married. Meanwhile, San Francisco hasn't crumbled in an earthquake. Locusts haven't devoured all the state's crops. California didn't slide into the ocean. And your day will continue on as usual.
Imagine that.
When the California Supreme Court ruled on May 15 that marriage is a civil right guaranteed to both straight and same-sex couples nearly five years after the Massachusetts Supreme Court reached the same conclusion, most Americans opened their mouths not in protest but to yawn, concerned far more with rising gas and food prices, or whether they'll lose their home in the mortgage crisis or their job to a looming recession.
But there have been others who've mouthed the same dire predictions of terrible consequences that haven't happened since Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage five years ago. Fathers haven't demanded the right to marry their daughters. Polygamy is still illegal. The sky hasn't fallen. Yet they continue to cry wolf.
Sounding like old-school segregationists, they whined that the ruling overturned the will of the people - even though we live in a constitutional republic, where it's the job of a state Supreme Court to uphold that state's constitution against a law that falls short of constitutional requirements.
And they cried out that the ruling deviated from their religious beliefs, the same justification once used to outlaw interracial marriage in many states.
Opponents tried unsuccessfully to stay the ruling, knowing public attitudes will change as they see thousands of same-sex couples from across the nation marrying in California. They've known this since March 2005, when a Boston Globe poll taken 10 months after thousands of Massachusetts' same-sex couples got married found residents' approval of it had increased to 56 percent.
They also know Californians overwhelmingly support domestic partner benefits for all unmarried couples. So, opponents of the ruling gathered enough signatures to place an initiative on November's ballot that would add the same wording to the state's constitution that the California Supreme Court just ruled unconstitutional as a state law: Only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid and recognized in California. (Unlike this amendment, Amendment 2 that Floridians will vote on in November will also ban "the substantial equivalent" of marriage, such as domestic partnerships and their benefits.)
But the California amendment may already be too late. The marriage ruling seems to have caused a paradigm shift in the public's view of same-sex marriage.
Days after the ruling, the non-partisan Field Poll found 51 percent of California voters agreed with it, and 54 percent opposed the ballot measure. Even better, a USA Today/Gallup Poll taken right after the ruling found only 33 percent of respondents think the government has a right to pass laws prohibiting same-sex marriages, while 63 percent think such marriages should be strictly a private decision between those involved. And that figure grows to 79 percent among the 18-to-29-year-olds polled.
As my favorite author Armistead Maupin explained in a recent interview with The Advocate, "The battle has largely been won, I think. The mean and tiny minds who've made it their mission to "defend marriage' have existed in every era and have always lost. They lost when black people were given the right to vote. They lost when women were finally enfranchised. They lost when the ban on interracial marriage was lifted. And in each of these instances they claimed with a righteous certainty to have God on their side, only to be roundly defeated by the abiding decency and good sense of the American people. Now we're in the midst of another seismic culture shift, thanks to several generations of lesbians and gay men who refused to live their lives in hiding. People know who we are now, and we are just not that scary anymore. The old bigots are dying off, and the young ones are learning, at the very least, to deny their homophobia. Our happy ending is finally in sight."
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