I often find myself baffled by the snide commentary of CNN's Bill Schneider, but in awarding the
Political Play of the Week to SF Mayor Gavin Newsom, he is dead on in catching what most conventional wisdom on gay marriage seems to ignore at its own peril:
The 36-year-old mayor is looking to the future. Polls show that younger Americans are much more inclined to favor same-sex marriage. It's like their civil rights issue.
"Imagine, people were saying in 1966 the same things they are saying now about blacks and whites getting married. That is my lifetime. And that is just so absurd as to be literally unbelievable," said Newsom.
This fact crystallized most for me this December when I was vacationing in Florida with my extended family. My cousin Rob is a junior at Florida State who, while a good guy at the end of the day, definitely subscribes to the current lifestyle that is stereotypical of upper-middle-class and wealthy suburban white males (with exceptions, myself among them)-- you know, heavy emphasis on drinking, smoking, women, cars, hip-hop, and, inevitably, homophobic language being tossed around in a pretty casual (although not deliberately degrading) manner. Yet for all the macho hardness, when I managed to draw my usually-apolitical cousin into a light-hearted discussion of current events, he casually remarked without any prompting that, "attaining gay marriage and full rights is probably the last real BIG thing left for the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement."
It was probably that moment more than any that I realized just how ingrained the concept of homosexuality as an uncontrollable fact of life, that is to be at the least tolerated and not discriminated against, has become over the last decade-- even the last 5 years alone-- in our popular culture and the generation of ours that most largely participates in it. At the end of the day, I think that the anti-marriage forces realize this too, and its part (along with the general sense of "losing the culture wars" in the late 1990's) of why they are pushing the FMA so hard-- to use another Civil Rights parallel, back then, it was the older generation in the South that resisted the strongest in favor of the status quo, while the younger generation of whites came to include leaders like Bill Clinton, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards who were deeply formulated attitudinally by a firm embrace of the positive changes that were happenning around them. The same is going on at college campuses around the nation, where all but the most right-wing and evangelical of conservative student groups are either trying to avoid this issue or supporting the cause of gay rights themselves.
So remember, this fight, this culture war if you will, is a day-by-day struggle for promoting fairness and equality, but it is bigger than any particular place, elected official, court decision or election. And inevitably, based not merely on the notions of moral gravitas and the weight of history moving forward, but on the sheer and simple force of generational momentum, the forces of justice and equality shall emerge triumphant.