MB Civic

The Bigots’ Last Gasp

Paul Waldman

June 14, 2006

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at  Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success , just released by John Wiley & Sons. The views expressed here are his own.

Few people could have been surprised that as election day approaches, Republicans in Congress would turn away from substantive issues and back to the well of homophobia to try to squeeze one more victory from the fear and hatred of their most committed supporters. But what is most striking about their current push to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage is how outdated the effort already seems. It’s like, so 2004.

The fact that the constitutional amendment is beginning to sound a bit like the macarena—a lot of Americans thought it was catchy once, but most aren’t too eager to hear it again—is testimony to how quickly this issue is evolving. In fact, even though a majority of Americans still oppose the legalization of gay marriage (the number has fallen to 51 percent in a recent Pew poll, the right has already lost this battle. There will be gay marriage everywhere in America, and it will be supported by most Americans. The only question is whether it happens in five years or ten years or 20 years.

This is occurring not just because people’s opinions are changing as the virtuous cycle takes hold (more gay people are out, which means more people know someone who is gay, which means people get more comfortable with it, which means more people feel free to come out, and around we go). The most important factor is generational replacement: those most opposed to civil rights for gay Americans are the older generations, who won’t be around forever. A majority of people under 35 already support gay marriage; anyone who thinks that future generations will be less supportive of equality than those living today, raise your hand.

We will see what we have seen in previous civil rights battles: change will happen first in progressive states, then in what we now consider purple states, and finally in the South (Although it may take a while there; consider that Alabama finally got around to repealing its law against interracial marriage in 2000. That is not a typo. And 40 percent of Alabamians voted to keep the law on the books.) Republicans will go through a period of speaking the right words to the rest of the country even as they mine prejudice for votes in the South, just as they have on race. But eventually they will repudiate their own history and stop doing even that.

To get a sense of how fast things have changed on this issue, let’s review a bit of recent history. In April 1997, actress Ellen DeGeneres and the character she played on the sitcom “Ellen” simultaneously came out of the closet. It was a cultural earthquake: a Lexis-Nexis search for March, April, and May of that year produces no fewer than 1,465 news stories about DeGeneres’ coming out, including 758—or over 25 stories per day— that April. It was so shocking that for a time, people seemed to talk of little else.

Yet here we are less than a decade later, and it seems hard to understand why it was such a big deal. Television and movies are full of gay characters, and as a consequence more and more Americans know someone who is gay (or rather, who they know is gay), even if that person is only a character on one of their favorite shows. In 1992, 42 percent of Americans told the CBS/New York Times poll that they personally knew a gay person; by 2004 the number had risen to 69 percent in a Los Angeles Times poll. And nothing changes opinions about gay rights faster than learning that someone you care for is gay.

And consider how fast the politics have changed. It’s true that in 2004 anti-gay marriage initiatives succeeded in 11 states. But the most remarkable thing was that we were discussing the issue at all. For years, gay activists felt that marriage equality was too dramatic a change to attempt to achieve. It was the right wing that used the specter of gay marriage as a scare tactic, but before you knew it we were seriously debating the issue. Remember the fury over gays in the military that led to “Don’t ask, don’t tell”? Today, by a two-to-one margin the public thinks gay people should be able to serve openly in the armed forces.

When Howard Dean started campaigning for the presidency in 2002, those in the know in Washington considered him the longest of long shots, not because he was against the Iraq war or because he came from a small state, but because he signed a civil unions bill as governor of Vermont. This, it was thought, ensured that regular Americans would see him as a far-out lefty kook. But by the time the primaries came to a close, all the other Democratic candidates had embraced civil unions (excepting those who endorsed gay marriage itself). And not long before election day, none other than George W. Bush said that if a state wanted to legalize civil unions, that was OK with him.

Today, as Bush gives speeches in favor of amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage, White House sources are trotted out to whisper to reporters that his heart isn’t in it. He’s not really a hateful guy, he just has to appease his base.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this sort of thing from Bush. According to Glen Maxey, who was then a Texas state legislator, during a 1999 debate about gays being permitted to adopt, Bush told him on the floor of the Texas legislature: “Glen, I value you as a person. I value you as a human being. And I want you to know that what I say publicly about gay people does not pertain to you personally.” Which is a nice thing to hear, when the guy telling you then turns around to argue that you’re such a moral reprobate that you shouldn’t be permitted to adopt children.

All of his supposed personal goodwill notwithstanding, Bush’s effort to amend the Constitution to prohibit gay marriage will one day be seen as of a piece with George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door: a relic of an earlier, uglier time, a politician playing on the worst instincts and prejudices of his most loyal supporters. It will be an episode in a story where the ending is a happy one in which justice prevails.

In our lifetimes, people who point to Leviticus as the reason they absolutely cannot abide homosexuality will come to look a bit like those who now hold fast to the view that the punishment for working on the Sabbath should be death (Exodus 31:15, in case you’re wondering). And as anti-gay sentiment of the kind Bush hopes to tap becomes the hallmark of fringe thought, the views he and his Republican compatriots express today will seem more and more repellent to more and more Americans.We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that prominent Democrats have hardly been models of moral courage on this issue; most now support civil unions while continuing to hold that “marriage should be between a man and a woman,” even though it is hard to avoid the feeling that they know what’s right but don’t have the guts to say it. But it’s always foolish to look to politicians for moral leadership. Not to worry—once they see how far the public has moved, they’ll come around.