Gay Marriage: A Great Day is Coming

It seems many on the right are practically begging the really crazy right to drop their opposition to Gay Marriage. In the past few days Bill O’Reilly and  Reince Priebus made similar remarks. O’Reilly said opponents couldn’t do anything but “thump the bible” which is laughable and shows how callow so much of the opposition is. For the true believers the bible is the whole deal, and thumping it is sort of what they do. Priebus told the party not to act like “Old Testament Heretics” on the subject. Many of us would have said the same thing a decade ago, and Republican operatives would have accused us of being close-minded religious bigots. My, my, my how times change.

A lot of Republicans are having Oh s*** moments. First immigration, now this.

Anyone with a brain, eyes or ears can see the dynamics have shifted. The court may make narrow decisions on the two cases they heard. They could do as little as turn the Prop 8 back to the California courts where it would almost certainly be overturned. Tough the practical effect of legalizing gay marriage in California would be the same, by this reasoning, at least the conservatives on the court could say they didn’t approve gay marriage. That would be cowardly decision, but it is possible. I am no expert, but looks like the Defense of Marriage Act is dead. Knocking this down will not immediately allow gay marriage across the country, but it will make discriminating against committed gay couples in benefits such as insurance immeasurably more difficult and expensive for those that choose to do so.  

Larger issues are at play here. The court will be reviled in some quarters no matter what it decides. In this case I suspect the anger aimed at cramped regressive anti-gay policies may be louder than what the right could muster if the Supreme Court rules across the board to allow gay marriage. Whatever the public anger we see in the wake of bad decisions that maintain marriage inequality, the court is in for something worse, illegitimacy. No matter the decision by 2016, there will be tremendous pressure to revisit whatever limitations that survive this round. With young people supporting gay marriage by 80 to 85% majorities, public opinions are going to continue to swing in the direction of expanded and proper rights for gays. What was a trickle is now a wave and will soon be a tsunami. Ralph Reed, and Hannity, and Mark Levin, and Limbaugh can talk all they want. It's over. It’s so f***ing over. If the court chooses to allow two standards of law, one for gays and one for everyone else, millions of young people are going to say that decision is illegitimate. By extension all these young people will call the court illegitimate as well. Good luck with that.

Many people look at Roe v. Wade and point to the fact that the country was not yet ready for the decision. Ruth Ginsburg a champion of women's rights has indicated some concerns with the way the court decided the decision, essentially granting a new Constitutional right enforceable  nationwide, rather than choosing the more narrow and possible route which was just to overturn the Texas law that was being considered. This would have left it to the states to sort out the mess. Many people believe a narrower decision would have removed a lot of the acrimony that has been sustained for close to 40 years regarding the abortion decision.

While that is a compelling point of view in that case I do not think it will hold in the Gay Marriage cases. This moment is different and generational. There is an ocean between the two sides. Those under 30 not only think gay marriage should be recognized by the state, they think the suggestion otherwise is sort of stupid, a specter of really old and moronically outdated thinking. That's the beauty of being under 30. You get to think things are old and stupid that seemed sane (or something) just a decade earlier. It’s hard to see how the court benefits from having a generation of young people come to decide it's old and stupid. This is especially so when one considers the tide of history on this issue.

I keep thinking about some of the committed gay couples I’ve known over the years. Even as a kid we had an “uncle” who we only learned much later was gay. I think my Catholic, but very tolerant, parents conspired with others of our aunts and uncles to identify him as our uncle so he would be welcomed without penalty or derision into our clan. He lived a committed relationship with another man for a really long time. He passed a few years ago, a lovely man. My brother and I and another fellow rented a duplex apartment in a fine old building in Hoboken for more than a decade. During that entire time, the basement apartment of that same building was rented by a long term committed gay couple. In another place I lived in Hoboken, a man down the hall ministered to and comforted his man, the love of his life, through his terrible agony and eventual death of AIDS. I am not sure all of these couples would have married if the right was available, but there is little doubt in my mind that some of them would have done so.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out in terms of divorce rates, numbers of children, their long term performance in schools and careers etc.  I have never understood how conservatives even tried to argue that a house filled with love, no matter the predominant orientation of that love was somehow worse for children than some of the circumstances we see in hetero households they so staunchly defend as the pillar of society.

One thing’s for sure now though. The dynamics have so changed our society is about to undergo a major transformation. In the first weekend Gavin Newsome OK’d gay marriage in San Francisco, the city issued 4,000 licenses to gay couples. Ironically it appears that as the right is widened the people that want to get married are gays. Hetero couples seems increasingly reticent and are marrying later and later. Of course that will change once the backlog is cleared, but there are going to be tens of thousands of gay marriages and that will change us.  In the decades ahead they will do more than read books like “Heather Has Two Mommies”. Heather will write her own book. She will change us and her children, gay or straight, will change us again. We may not get there with the Supreme Courts’ decision this summer, but we will get there soon.