Wedding Bells
That's Jeffrey Rosen, on why the Mass. marriages will be an anti-climax. The conventional (i.e. anti-radical) liberal argument on marriage goes something like this: gay marriage is inevitable, if we take things step by step. Start by lobbying legislatures on behalf of civil unions, like the ones in Vermont or the similar domestic partnership laws in California. That will take a while, and in the meantime people will see that the gay marriages in Canada, Holland and Boston haven't brought about Armageddon. At that point we'll be able to get marriage is most of the states, and eventually the Supreme Court will knock the remaining flyover states into line.On May 17, by order of the state supreme court, the first same-sex couples in the United States will be legally married in Massachusetts.
Opponents of gay marriage fear that, after May 17, same-sex couples will flock to Massachusetts from other states, get married, and return to their home states demanding recognition of their new marriages. These fears are unfounded, thanks to a provision of the Massachusetts marriage law that refuses to recognize marriages celebrated in Massachusetts if they take place between parties domiciled in a state that does not recognize the marriage as valid. ... [A] well-settled body of law says that states don't have to recognize the marriages of their own residents who have traveled to another state to get married for the purpose of circumventing a strongly held public policy in their home state.
Rosen notes that "Southern states were even more fervent in their opposition to miscegenation than opponents of gay marriage are today." He then discusses how the fall of anti-miscegenation laws played out and contends that we can expect a similar outcome in the gay marriage debate:
I have niggling doubts. Anti-miscegenation laws were a southern phenomena, and opposition to interracial marriage was virtually unheard of in the north. It was easy to let states work it out on their own. But the gay marriage debate is not regional. There is a sizeable gay population here in Charleston, or in Salt Lake; there are fundamentalist Baptist congregations New York and L.A. that purchased blocks of free Passion tickets to hand out to potential conflicts. The major division on the marriage issue is not geographic, but generational: Datalounge runs the 18-39 demographic is in favor of gay marriage 62% to 33% with the 65+ fogies against marriage 69% to 21%.Unless they are forced by courts to recognize gay marriage before the public is ready, state legislatures may move through the same progression, recognizing first civil unions and eventually gay marriage. For the moment, the best thing for judges to do is the thing they're most likely to do, which is very little.
This says to me: progressives would be making a mistake to lobby legislatures to pass civil union legislation. The priority needs to be preventing legislatures from doing anything to hamstring the inevitable future public support for gay marriage. Time is on our side, but we have to hold off the current opponents long enough for the kids being raised on Queer Eye to hit voting age. That means playing a defensive game.
