Resistance to Gay Marriage gasps its last gasps

Everyone I know is celebrating the decision by the Iowa Supreme Court declaring gay marriage bans unconstitutional. That tells you something about my friends. But my friends are not on the fringes. Despite the setback represented by the passage of Proposition 8 in California, it seems clear that we have taken steps toward the day this discriminatory policy is swept away and gay couples can marry everywhere. Nate Silver did some analysis that shows every state permitting gay marriage by 2024. And, more encouragingly, anyplace you might want to live will accept it by 2014 - just 5 years from now. If you're gay and want to marry in the states of the old confederacy, you'll need to wait it out.

Is this overly optimistic? Not by my reasoning. I've written on this topic before, and previously compared the ban on gay marriage to the ban on interracial marriage. In 1964, in McLaughlin v. Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that morality laws that punished interracial couples who committed adultery more severely than same race couples were unconstitutional. It was only a short three years before the Supreme Court swept away all miscegenation laws in the Loving v. Virginia ruling. I don't envision a sweeping Court ruling like this on the gay marriage question, at least not in the next three years. But what Nate picks up on is the gradual crumbling of these biases and the elevation of younger voters who are more tolerant into the majority. The change will come state-by-state until, I think, we see a Court decision, after much of the dismantling has occurred, that will sweep away the last opposition. We won't have to wait until 2024 for Mississippi to allow gay marriage. The Court will end laws banning gay marriage before then. Between now and then expect vocal support for gay marriage bans from the right-wing and religious fringe, just as the Klan loudly opposed the extension of civil rights to blacks.

Update 4/9: Came across a great Op-ed from the NY Times that captures a nice circular narrative that places Iowa, unexpectedly, at the leading edge of social change.