Matt Yglesias

Marriage Equality Rulings and Public Opinion

I think people don’t spend enough time dwelling on tests of hypotheses that don’t really pan out. So I was interested in this chart from Patrick Egan and Nathaniel Persily seen over at the Monkey Cage looking at how judicial decisions in favor of gay marriage claims impact public opinion on marriage equality:

The answer seems to be . . . not much happening here. If you just look at Vermont, you can tell a story about how judicial ruling in favor of marriage equality lent the cause legitimacy. But if you look at Iowa or Connecticut it seems like a story of a surge in public support for marriage equality leading to judicial action.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that there’s no real evidence here for any handwringing concerns about backlash. The opinion trend in favor of marriage equality is pretty strongly favorable, and courts should do the right thing.

Age, Marriage Equality, and Knowing Gay People

Some interesting data from Andrew Gelman and Daniel Lee. First the familiar finding that support for marriage equality is strongly correlated with being young:

Second, who tells pollsters that they know someone who’s gay:

Now one assumes that America’s senior citizens are actually mistaken about this and have, in fact, been acquainted with a gay person or two over the course of their lives. But they probably didn’t realize it.

At any rate, there are interesting age-related patterns in both questions but they look to be very different patterns. The under-30 cohort’s strong support for marriage equality, in particular, doesn’t seem to stem from any notably greater familiarity with gay individuals.

Social Conservatism Beyond the Easy Parts

James Dobson (official photo)

Ross Douthat has a great column in today’s times looking at American social conservatism through the lens of Judd Apatow’s movies. All three Apatow films have, as he points out, strains of conservative values running through them. But in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up conservative choices wind up working out suspiciously well. In the darker Funny People, by contrast, bad choices have unchangeable consequences and doing the right thing proves painful:

Still a virgin in middle age? Not to worry — you’ll find a caring, foxy woman who’s been waiting her whole life for an awkward, idealistic guy like you. Pregnant from a drunken one-night stand? Good news — the oaf who knocked you up will turn out to be a decent guy, and you’ll be able to keep the baby and your career as a rising entertainment-news anchorwoman. Frittering away your life on porn and pot? Fear not — your wasted twenties won’t stop you from being a great dad.

With “Funny People,” though, Apatow is offering a more realistic morality play. This time, doing the right thing has significant costs — but you have to do it anyway. This time, doing the wrong things for too long has significant consequences — and you have to live with them. It’s the first Apatow film in which love doesn’t conquer all. And it’s the first Apatow film in which you get punished for your sins.

Ross says this is “probably what American audiences don’t like about” Funny People because the United States is a country that’s “conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.”

I think this explains a lot about the appeal of anti-gay crusades to social conservative leaders. Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard. Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.

Culture, Politics, and Majoritarianism

Adam Nagourney has a smart piece in the NYT taking a wider-lens look at the issue of gay rights groups’ disappointment with what’s been achieved politically thus far. Nagourney notes that over the past ten years the broader American culture has become wildly more tolerant of gays and lesbians, but even with a new progressive administration in place the policy arena remains fairly unfriendly:

Yet if the culture is moving on, national politics is not, or at least not as rapidly. Mr. Obama has yet to fulfill a campaign promise to repeal the policy barring openly gay people from serving in the military. The prospects that Congress will ever send him a bill overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, appear dim. An effort to extend hate-crime legislation to include gay victims has produced a bitter backlash in some quarters: Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, sent a letter to clerics in his state arguing that it would be destructive to “faith, families and freedom.”

“America is changing more quickly than the government,” said Linda Ketner, a gay Democrat from South Carolina who came within four percentage points of winning a Congressional seat in November. “They are lagging behind the crowd. But if I remember my poli sci from college, isn’t that the way it always works?”

The underlying dynamic here illustrates why it’s always been a mistake to try to draw a contrast between gay rights groups’ efforts to secure equality through the courts and to secure equality through the political process. The fact of the matter is that the political process simply isn’t very friendly to minority rights claims even when the claims themselves are reasonably popular. Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has become a majoritarian position, but the Obama administration would still prefer to avoid the headaches involved in working to repeal it. At the same time, if a court case were to order the administration to end this policy, it’s abundantly clear that there would be no critical mass of political support for trying to put it back in place.

Either way, the basic fact of the matter is that the political system is biased toward doing nothing. The mere fact that a majority is prepared to support claims of equality doesn’t mean that political leaders want to expend time and energy making our clunky legislative mechanics produce laws reflecting that fact. Under the circumstances, people with just claims to make on their own behalf are wise to pursue those claims through all available avenues including the judiciary.

Democratic Leaders Say DADT Is Someone Else’s Problem

Harry Reid (official portrait)

The Advocate reports that Senate leader Harry Reid (D-NV) doesn’tanticipate doing anything to repeal the military’s unfair “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of discriminating against gay and lesbian servicemembers:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid speaking at a press conference Monday said he has no plans to introduce a bill to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the Senate.

“I haven’t identified any sponsors,” he said. “My hope is that it can be done administratively.”

Meanwhile, the administration’s view is that Obama shouldn’t do anything and it’s up to congress to change the law. It’s a neat paradox, but hard to escape the conclusion that the issue of fairness and equality here is not being taken very seriously. Everyone in the castle favors DADT repeal but it just can’t be done.

New Front Opens in Supreme Court Confirmation Farce

It’s really hard to think of a sadder spectacle in small-d democratic politics than Supreme Court confirmation battles. They’re always changing, and yet always the same. Apparently the right’s new idea is to make the nominee answer questions about gay marriage. The goal, of course, will be to get the nominee to admit to her secret plan to force Orrin Hatch into a sinful-yet-matrimonial union with Larry Craig. The nominee will stonewall. This episode from the recent past is a preview of the future:

Noting that as solicitor general [Elana] Kagan would be charged with defending the 1996 marriage law, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) asked in a written question to Kagan whether she believes in a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. “There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage,” Kagan responded.

When Cornyn sought Kagan’s opinion of the Massachusetts high court’s ruling in 2003 in favor of same-sex marriage, she said she could not recall expressing one. “I suspect I participated in informal conversation about the decision when it came out, but I cannot remember anything that I said,” Kagan wrote.

Soon, we’ll get an all-amnesiac SCOTUS. The future’s going to be awesome.

Tactically, a shift in focus away from abortion and toward marriage equality actually strikes me as pretty misguided. You really could imagine the Supreme Court substantially narrowing the constitutional protections of Roe and Casey over the next couple of years or even overturning it on a medium-range time-frame. And if constitutional jurisprudence changes, many states will adopt more restrictive abortion laws. But no amount of screwing around with the Supreme Court is going to halt the turn toward gay and lesbian equality.

Politicians who devote a lot of time and energy in 2009 to holding back the tide are just going to look more monstrous in retrospect than their colleagues who found other things to be busybodies about. Does anyone think that in 2039 anyone’s going to be proudly and publicly talking about how “I got my start working for Senator so-and-so trying to stop loving couples from getting married?”

Time to Do Something on DADT

I keep forgetting to link to my column in yesterday’s Daily Beast about Barack Obama’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” foot dragging:

The problem with the arguments for inaction isn’t that they’re wrong, it’s that they prove too much. The military is always doing important work under difficult conditions. And the president is always dealing with a variety of hugely important issues. No day is ever going to be a convenient day for the brass to stop doing what they’re doing, and start dealing with the difficulties involved in getting soldiers accustomed to serving alongside openly gay and lesbian crew members. And no day is ever going to be a convenient day for the White House political team to pick a fight with the military. But that’s a reason to avoid delay, not to embrace it. The current policy is as wrong as it was during the campaign, and firing skilled and patriotic linguists is as insane today as it was during the campaign. [...]

Instead of writing more letters to patriotic men and women in uniform who are tired of living a lie, it’s time for Obama to start writing letters to members of Congress urging them to change the rules.

Read the whole thing here.

Marriage Equality Comes to Maine

Good news from Maine and a nice statement by Governor John Baldacci:

“In the past, I opposed gay marriage while supporting the idea of civil unions,” Baldacci said in a written statement. “I have come to believe that this is a question of fairness and of equal protection under the law, and that a civil union is not equal to civil marriage.”

I think the civil unions fudge is very appealing to a lot of fair-minded but cautious politicians. Ultimately, however, it doesn’t make a ton of sense. If you want to be fair-minded, then you should do the fair thing.

Meanwhile, note that the purported “backlash effect” against judge-driven steps to marriage equality is never to be found. Instead, different paths to the same goal work in tandem. Political institutions and political circumstances are different in different jurisdictions. It’s very smart of equality advocates to press forward through the different plausible routes available to them.