Matt Yglesias

Marriage Equality Opinion Feedback Loop

Thinking about the seemingly rapid advances the once-toxic cause of marriage equality is making in public opinion polls illustrates, I think, the fact that not only do politicians take cues from public opinion, but the public takes cues from politicians.

In this particular case, it’s been clear for a few years now that the trend in public opinion was ineradicably moving in the direction of equality. That’s encouraged a lot of the more far-sighted political elites to start moving in a more gay-friendly position. You see this especially among conservatives where for the past few years supporting civil unions or full marriage equality has been the method of choice for demonstrating reasonableness. And I think that elites shifting to more gay-friendly positions has a substantial impact on the large number of Americans who I think are basically fair-minded but who, being of a certain age, just found the idea of same-sex marriage initially too shocking to contemplate.

Meanwhile, as more and more jurisdictions have permitted marriage or civil unions, the sky keeps not falling. And all that only further accelerates the trend.

NOM Remix

Gay marriage threatens to put us on a terrifying slippery slope:

Intellectual property policy angle here.

The Gathering Storm

One of the problems facing opponents of marriage equality is that it’s not as if straight people are being asked to give anything up when gay and lesbian couples want to get married. The lives of heterosexuals will just continue as before. The National Organization for Marriage, however, is ready to try to mobilize people into a state of inchoate fear with this ad designed to make you think that gay marriage is an urgent threat to your liberty:

The closest thing to a legitimate issue here seems to have to do with the Massachusetts public schools. Clearly, a state adopting a non-discriminatory marriage policy doesn’t actually force the state to teach non-discriminatory values in schools. But the two tend to go together. We not only don’t have Jim Crow anymore, but we teach people that racism is wrong. This is, it’s true, a big imposition on racists. And people who don’t like gay people can be legitimately concerned that the spread of gay equality will create an environment in which their children are less likely to share their own prejudices.

On the other hand, that’s all pretty tautological. But what’s the deal with the woman who says “I’m a California doctor forced to choose between my faith and my job”? What is it she wants to do? Does her faith prohibit her from giving medical care to gays and lesbians? That sounds like a pretty sick faith. And a clear violation of existing medical ethics anyway.

Gay Marriage Backlash

Megan McArdle reflects on the success of Proposition 8 in California and offers a familiar backlash narrative:

I do think, though, that the success of anti-gay-marriage initiatives reinforces something I strongly believe: the issue was pressed too quickly, and in the wrong venue. Using the courts to establish a right to gay marriage made opponents feel threatened, and railroaded. If socially conservative voters hadn’t felt they needed to protect themselves from activist judges, we wouldn’t be seeing these provisions written into state constitutions. Few of them would probably have bothered to vote out legislators who voted for gay marriage five years from now. But with it on the ballot, in front of them, and worries that judges would make the decision unless they did, they shot it down even in California.

In general, courts are the wrong place to press these sorts of claims. The courts were appropriate for civil rights because blacks were literally denied the right to participate in the legislative democratic process. And on a practical level, they worked because a majority of people in the country were more than happy to force civil rights on an unhappy white southern minority. Unfortunately, too many groups have decided that the success of civil rights can be widely applied to circumvent the electorate on issues where there is no public consensus. Now widespread gay marriage seems quite a bit less likely for the near term than it would have been had we attacked the issue legislatively.

The narrative is familiar because it’s often offered as an account of the politics of abortion. But efforts to study the issue empirically, as opposed to just opine from the armchair, never actually adduce evidence of this kind of effect.

That aside, granting the backlash hypothetically, I never quite understand what the upshot of this sort of analysis is. Say you’re living your life with your partner and you want to get married. But then the local legal authorities tell you that you can’t get married. That seems like unfair discrimination to you, so you inquire with an attorney. The attorney says, yes, your state has never allowed a man to be legally wed to another man, but he agrees with you that it’s unfair. And not just unfair, illegal, a violation of your state constitution’s guarantees of equal rights. So you sue! Then the case comes before a judge and the judge thinks, yeah, the local authorities’ action is a violation of the state constitution’s guarantee of equal rights. Is the judge supposed to rule against you even though he thinks your case has merits, offering as his reasoning “it would be counterproductive to the long-term political strategy of the gay rights movement for me to offer the ruling I believe to be correct”? That doesn’t sound right.

And is Gay Rights Central Command suppose to somehow stop you from suing? How would they do that?

The fact is that as best I can tell most gay rights organizations agreed with Megan about this. As of a few years ago, their big idea was to push for what they saw as practical legislative goals — hate crimes laws and an Employment Non-Discrimination Act — to help slowly but surely continue to build legislative support for full equality before the law. But they had no ability to prevent various individuals in Hawaii, Massachusetts, California, and elsewhere from pursuing their legal rights as they saw fit.

The Waning of the Culture War?

Peter Beinart says public interest in “culture war” issues is on the wane, not just as a transient phenomenon of the financial crisis, but as a turning of the great wheel of history. He says this isn’t the first time:

This won’t be the first time a culture war has come to a close. In the 1920s, battles over evolution, immigration, prohibition and the resurgent Ku Klux Klan dominated election after election. And those issues played into that era’s version of the red-blue divide, pitting newly arrived, saloon-frequenting, big-city Catholics against old-stock, teetotaling, small-town Protestants. In 1924, the Democratic convention split so bitterly over prohibition and the Klan that it took more than 100 ballots to nominate a candidate for president.

Then, says Beinart, that era came to a close in the 1930s driven to an end by a combination of economic problems and generational turnover. Beinart says something similar is happening today:

Today, according to a recent Newsweek poll, the economy is up to 44 percent and “issues like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage” down to only 6 percent. It’s no coincidence that Palin’s popularity has plummeted as the financial crisis has taken center stage. From her championing of small-town America to her efforts to link Barack Obama to former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, Palin is treading a path well-worn by Republicans in recent decades. She’s depicting the campaign as a struggle between the culturally familiar and the culturally threatening, the culturally traditional and the culturally exotic. But Obama has dismissed those attacks as irrelevant, and the public, focused nervously on the economic collapse, has largely tuned them out.

Palin’s attacks are also failing because of generational change. The long-running, internecine baby boomer cultural feud just isn’t that relevant to Americans who came of age after the civil rights, gay rights and feminist revolutions. Even many younger evangelicals are broadening their agendas beyond abortion, stem cells, school prayer and gay marriage. And just as younger Protestants found JFK less threatening than their parents had found Al Smith, younger whites — even in bright-red states — don’t view the prospect of a black president with great alarm.

I think we should be suspicious of arguments that seem to assume that US political history operates as a series of repeating long cycles. Realistically, the number of cases Beinart is working with here are somewhere between one and two, not nearly enough to use as the basis for meaningful predictions. It’s definitely true that the economic downturn is making GOP culture war attacks relatively ineffective. But something similar was true in 1992. Elections that take place during recessions are dominated by a desire to punish the incumbent party. But that doesn’t mean people don’t care about these issues anymore. What’s more, I would say that part of the reason the McCain-Palin camp’s culture war politics seems so lame is that McCain’s record has left him unable to campaign on Federal Marriage Amendment or the need to rounp-up immigrants and deport them. Unlike praise of small towns and vague condemnations of “fake” Virginia, those are real issues — genuine subjects of legislative activity that I can imagine people running and winning on. Not, to be sure, amidst a recession and with a hugely unpopular conservative incumbent. But I have a feeling both of those issues will be back soon enough.

Kay Hagan’s Radical Homosexual Agenda

Liddy Dole’s allies in the North Carolina GOP break out the big guns:

A new mailer in support of incumbent Sen. Elizabeth Dole claims that Hagan’s agenda, with the help of “liberal judges,” will be to advance a “radical homosexual agenda” which includes same-sex marriage, removing “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, and forcing the Boy Scouts to accept gay and atheist troop leaders.

To my ear, that sounds more like a radical atheist agenda that promotes equality for gays and lesbians as a side effect. What, exactly, is the gay interest in removing “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance? I’m also interested in the idea that picture depicts one “radical homosexual” newlywed in a bowtie and the other in a conventional tie — I’ve only been to two weddings and both featured straight couples, but my assumption would be that the couple would coordinate neckware and avoid this kind of mismatch.

Marriage is So Gay

As of 2004, Connecticut had one of the lowest divorce rates in the country, but I think that the Nutmeg state’s hetero couples will soon be feeling an irresistable urge to ditch marriage, since we all know that this sort of thing undermines our blessed institutions:

Same-sex couples won the right to marry in Connecticut in an historic ruling by the Supreme Court today. Citing the equal protection clause of the state constitution, the justices ruled that civil unions were discriminatory. In a 4-3 decision released at 11:30 a.m., the majority wrote that the state’s “understanding of marriage must yield to a more contemporary appreciation of the rights entitled to constitutional protection.”

In Massachusetts, of course, traditional family values were outlawed years ago. But I hear the legislature is now considering a proposal that would mandate that all men enter into a polygamous gay union with Bill Ayers at a mass-wedding ceremony performed by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.