William Saletan on how and why Barack Obama got around to endorsing Same-Sex Wedlock. There's more to it than just the polls but not much. And no, I don't think our president had a revelation about the injustice of not allowing gays to marry. If anything, it was a revelation that it wouldn't hurt and might well help his election chances.
You know, reading the debate online, I'm always struck about how opponents of this kind of thing keep using the term "defend marriage." They made up an imaginary war on marriage, deciding letting gays do it would destroy it for everyone, and they don't seem to want to engage the real point its proponents are making, which is that it doesn't threaten marriage in any way.
But the thing is that marriage is kinda losing its importance in society. More and more heterosexual couples are opting to live together without the benefit of legal marriage. More and more children are being born to couples who have not officially tied the knot. There's hard, inarguable data that this is happening, whereas the notion that Gay Marriage harms marriage in general is at best an unproven, hard-to-articulate theory. The divorce rate is also on a slow, steady rise as it has been for decades now.
So if someone is worried that marriage is "threatened," aren't they ignoring the real threat? Shouldn't they be working to ban divorces and co-habitation instead of that small group of folks who are fighting to get married? Or is there some theory out there I don't know about that says Gay Marriage is the reason Straight Marriages are declining? Come to think of it, I'll bet there is…