As readers of this blog know, I think it's absurd and barbaric that same-sex couples don't have all the rights of boy/girl duos to wed. Still, I have a bad feeling about the court battle currently being waged against California's Proposition 8. A loss will set the movement back and I'm not so sure a victory won't, as well. It seems to me that my state was already well on track to legalizing Same-Sex Wedlock, as other states have, in some not-too-distant election. It's been on the ballot twice here. The first time it lost, it lost by 22 points. The second time, Prop 8 went down by a little less than 5 points. Notice which direction the momentum is going…and it isn't just in California. All but a very few outlier polls nationwide show the same trend…and some surveys in this state suggest 8 would be defeated if we voted on it today.
I have no idea if the lawyers behind the current effort (as described in this article) are right that they can get it overturned in court but wouldn't it be better if Gay Marriage was legalized by voters? Ultimately, it has to pass muster on more than just a statutory level. Those who now oppose it have to accept it as a basic fact of society, not as something arrived at by legal technicalities and slick lawyering…even if that strict lawyering is accomplishing what is right and proper.
The way this thing is going to play out is that eventually, there will be some widespread number of common gender weddings and enough time will have passed to assess their impact, which will be nil. Those who now fear such unions may notice that the world has not stop revolving and that "traditional marriage" has not crumbled as an institution. They'll find more threatening things to worry about, the way pretty much the same people have stopped worrying about flag-burning. Remember when that was the greatest danger to the American way of life?
We can get to that day through court decisions, true. But I think we'll get there sooner and with less bloodshed if it's the will of the people. Which, increasingly, it is.