At the end of the 1970 Pearl Harbor film Tora! Tora! Tora!, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto states in the aftermath of the attacks that “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Perhaps the American Family Association and other right-wing groups should have thought the same thing the night the Proposition 8 act was passed.
The pro-gay marriage movement has probably made more progress in just the past few months than it ever has before. Imagine the following scenario: A governor finds himself facing dismal approval ratings following his terrible handling of the state budget. He needs to find a new issue to bring to the table. He hopes that by pushing the gay marriage issue, he can get his approval ratings back at an acceptable level. And what does he decide to do? He decides to lobby the state legislature to legalize gay marriage.
That scenario would have sounded ridiculous to political observers a couple of years ago, but this is exactly the scenario that’s playing out in New York right now.
If you’ve been following the news, you also know that the states of Iowa and Vermont legalized same-sex marriage recently. Vermont, in fact, became the first state to do so by way of state legislature—which spared us all moaning from the right wing about “activist judges,” which is a highly subjective, vacuous, meaningless phrase that ought to be barred from the political lexicon forever. But I digress.
The states of Maine, New Jersey and New Hampshire are also currently debating the issue in their own state legislatures—and in addition the Washington, D.C. City Council recently voted to recognize same-sex marriages performed outside of the city limits.
Though the pro-gay marriage movement may have accelerated in the past few months—likely in part due to a newfound resolve in the LGBTQ rights movement after the disappointing passage of Proposition 8—it has been gaining steam for the past several years.
This might seem difficult to believe, considering the number of states that passed gay marriage bans over the past couple of years, and I do not mean to belittle the amount of effort it will take to repeal those bans. But things were always going to get worse before they got better.
These were the inevitable if lamentable results of a state legalizing gay marriage. Civil rights issues never have been and never will be won easily.
While it is true that every state that has had one of these bans has passed it (Arizona rejected one in 2006 before supporting a slightly less draconian one in 2008), such bans have been getting less and less of the vote.
Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com recently noted that same-sex marriage bans have lost an average of two percent of the vote every year. So if a hypothetical state voted last year to ban gay marriage with 51 percent of the vote, such a state would theoretically vote against that very same ban with 51 percent of the vote this year.
Some states that previously passed bans might be ready to repeal them in the not-too-distant future. I believe, for example, that there is an excellent chance that California’s Proposition 8 will be overturned in 2010.
Similarly, a pollster.com graph of all polls asking the United States public whether they support or oppose gay marriage has shown over the years there has been a slow but steady increase in the amount of American citizens who support it.
There are multiple explanations for this. One is that many people who once opposed it, as they get more used to the idea of gay marriage—and as they see that Massachusetts has not turned into a seething hellhole of disease and doom-may—now support it.
Another explanation is generational. Polls have indicated far greater support for same-sex marriage amongst younger voters than amongst older ones. As older voters—how do I put this delicately?—exit the voting pool and are replaced by the younger generation, this too will cause support for same-sex marriage to increase in the coming years.
This does not mean that the pro-gay marriage movement is out of the woods yet. A large majority of Americans still oppose gay marriage.
Many of the states currently debating same-sex marriage likely will not find enough votes to pass it—so if you live in one of those states, contact your state representatives pronto!
And overturning all of the bans that have already passed will be a long and arduous process that will take years—but the battle will eventually be won. The more our generation does to move the effort along, the quicker marriage equality will be achieved.
—Brian Hamm ’09 is Co-President of the Vassar College Democrats.
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