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State and Maine
Nov. 4th, 2009 10:34 amSo, marriage equality lost in Maine last night.
This morning, I caught myself wasting time and energy reading commentary on rabid conservative blogs gloating about how the public voting down gay marriage has succeeded 31 out of 31 times while insisting it's not about equal rights or love but about silencing and persecuting Christians. It takes a remarkably self-centered and insular point of view to come up with something like the latter "point", obviously, but the first point might seem harder to refute. It keeps getting voted down... so why do people keep trying?
The gloating social conservatives are asking that right now. "When are they going to learn? When are they going to give up? When are they going to realize that America doesn't want them?"
Their triumphant (and triumphalist) rhetoric likely masks a very real fear. They are losing. Each year that life and business proceed as usual in the states that allow gay marriage, each year that even more families have their separate-but-less-equal partnerships in even more jurisdictions and the nuclear family erodes no faster or further because of it, each year that children go to schools that have openly gay students and teachers and are exposed to openly gay artists and characters, their position erodes.
The generational gap on marriage equality is likely to be a death knell for its opposition. It's not guaranteed to be... some generational gaps exist more because of how individuals' viewpoints change as they age, not because of a shift in society. But I find that unlikely to be the case here. The members of the older generation who oppose gay marriage now were probably not in favor of it when they were youngsters.
So, yeah, it sucks that a majority of voters in Maine voted to turn back the clock on social progress. It isn't and it can't be the final word. As with most anything else in this life, we only fail when we give up... until then we only haven't succeeded yet.
This morning, I caught myself wasting time and energy reading commentary on rabid conservative blogs gloating about how the public voting down gay marriage has succeeded 31 out of 31 times while insisting it's not about equal rights or love but about silencing and persecuting Christians. It takes a remarkably self-centered and insular point of view to come up with something like the latter "point", obviously, but the first point might seem harder to refute. It keeps getting voted down... so why do people keep trying?
The gloating social conservatives are asking that right now. "When are they going to learn? When are they going to give up? When are they going to realize that America doesn't want them?"
Their triumphant (and triumphalist) rhetoric likely masks a very real fear. They are losing. Each year that life and business proceed as usual in the states that allow gay marriage, each year that even more families have their separate-but-less-equal partnerships in even more jurisdictions and the nuclear family erodes no faster or further because of it, each year that children go to schools that have openly gay students and teachers and are exposed to openly gay artists and characters, their position erodes.
The generational gap on marriage equality is likely to be a death knell for its opposition. It's not guaranteed to be... some generational gaps exist more because of how individuals' viewpoints change as they age, not because of a shift in society. But I find that unlikely to be the case here. The members of the older generation who oppose gay marriage now were probably not in favor of it when they were youngsters.
So, yeah, it sucks that a majority of voters in Maine voted to turn back the clock on social progress. It isn't and it can't be the final word. As with most anything else in this life, we only fail when we give up... until then we only haven't succeeded yet.
