The Inevitability of Gay Marriage

Tomorrow morning, the California Supreme Court will announce its decision in the Prop 8 case, and though the actual issue it's deciding, whether Prop 8 is more properly considered an amendment or a revision, is procedural rather than substantively about gay marriage, it still occurs within a political context.

Which is... what? Proponents of gay marriage are jubilant. The winter of our Prop 8 discontent is a distant memory, seemingly now made summer by a spate of advancements of gay marriage in Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, and most notably Iowa. Proponents and opponents alike have, just to shuffle up the metaphor, identified these events as a long-awaited, much-prophesied avalanche, soon to cover the country in a cleansing coat of powdery, snowy civil rights. Democrats are dancing on the grave of the Christian Right, and (younger) Republicans publicly acknowledge that they've long known being the party of homophobia is a demographic dead end.

I believe in the inevitability of gay marriage. I'm just not sure we're quite mid-avalanche yet; I'm not sure a permanent demographic shift has suddenly come in to being. Sure, we've stacked up some victories in rapid fashion, but the forces that brought us Prop 8 are still around. It was only seven months ago, and it was in CALIFORNIA. In what was otherwise a sea change of an election. It was a thumping.

What if the court holds Prop 8 is constitutional, as many say it is likely to? Worse, what if the voters of Iowa decide to overturn their court's decision? After all, Iowa is the crown jewel of the so-called avalanche because it's a "heartland" state as opposed to godless Vermont and Maine. Indeed, the advancements in those two states came from the legislature, the "people's branch," making them much more stable (Vermont's in fact from an override of a gubernatorial veto), whereas Iowa's came from the courts, albeit unanimously (unlike Connecticut's 4-3 decision).

I don't really think Iowa's voters will overturn their court's decision. It can't go to ballot there till 2012, and the avalanche may be real by then. My larger point is that the left's "inevitability" prophecy also functions as an excuse for complacency, sometimes to the point, as we sometimes saw during the Democratic primary last year, of regarding gay marriage as an unimportant distraction. Avalanches don't require work, after all, and in the meantime, we get out-hustled by gay marriage opponents (which is exactly what happened) on our own turf.