As I checked my mail earlier, I was pretty depressed when I initially read a friend's blog post and learned of the
"strong support" for the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. So I decided to take a closer look into it. And while some of the quotes in that article are pretty damn freaky, and I was a bit surprised to see that most people would be OK with an amendment (I at least thought that more people who are against gay marriage wouldn't be willing to go that far), I figured out that things aren't all that bad.
First of all, there's the obvious fact: poll support by a 55-40 margin doesn't exactly constitute landslide support in even the most alarmist of sane interpretations. ESPECIALLY when you're talking about a constitutional amendment, which needs 2/3 majorities in Congress and most states to take effect. Hell, I'm sure that if you asked people if they supported a flag-burning amendment you'd get greater numbers, yet that's gone nowhere; ditto if you asked them about an Equal Rights Amendment, something that very nearly came into existence before Phyllis Schlafly and her mad-as-hell-housewives' brigade came along.
Then there's the other evidence of just how skewed the reporting here is to lend itself to the headline's news-making conclusion, countering the poll's details continuously and not exactly coming close to a representative sample in those quoted for comments.
And finally, something I've been noticing every time I read an article talking about the politics of gay marriage and the public's opposition, which I found here again: they always briefly mention the facts that young people (those under 30 usually) and those who have openly gay friends/relatives/co-workers involved in their lives are twice as supportive as the rest of America. It's as if that's some kind of a footnote to the issue, semi-relevant extra details. But given that we are undeniably becoming a country where its more normalized for people to be "out," and that this trend has had a direct correlation with positive attitudes towards gay rights, the tide obviously continues to move in the right direciton. As for our generation: yeah, we don't vote now, but we eventually will and those positive attitudes about gay rights that our MTV culture has helped harvest aren't gonna disappear then. And in that case, you're pretty much talking everyone except the (sadly large) portion of the youth raised in right-wing evangelist communities; as the now-famous NY Times Magazine article this summer about the rise of conservative college groups documented, even most Young Republican types these days either are pro-gay-marriage or at the least do everything they can to distance themselves from the "Religious Right."
So minimizing that all and talking about how huge and unstoppable the anti-gay-marriage groundswell is going to be just might be giving into short-term sensationalism aimed at Election 2004 more than any long-term reality. Does this mean that the Federal Marriage Amendment won't be an issue next fall? No-- the current numbers still are the current numbers, the Right will never accept Bush failing to back the FMA and Karl Rove won't have that, and Bush will undoubtedly keep on the (probably genuine from what I've heard, since he does have some close family friends who are gay, not to mention the bind this puts Cheney in) visage of reluctance while allied groups do all the deplorable dirty work. But itdoes show that this thing doesn't have sticking power, and you should take the "liberal media" conventional wisdom on this one with a grain of salt.