One day, not long from now, it will be hard to remember what worried people so much about gay and lesbian couples committing themselves to marriage. And, when that day comes, President Obama’s remarks last week about how, “personally,” it was “important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married” will seem mild and obvious. That is not to diminish the importance of his statement. It’s just to note that same-sex marriage is a historical inevitability—and what people say about it now, for and against, will be seen in that light.
If you grew up in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, it was quite possible to know adults then who said things like “I’m all for civil rights. But marriage between Negroes and whites? I don’t know.” You might have been utterly baffled, but there it was. In 1968, the year after the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, in Loving v. Virginia, seventy-two per cent of Americans disapproved of marriage between whites and non-whites, and only twenty per cent approved. When Margaret Rusk, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, married a black man, Rusk offered to resign to save the Johnson Administration from embarrassment. (Johnson did not take him up on it.) Interracial couples faced stares, ostracism, discrimination in housing and employment, and a common theory that they were pathological. In 1965, the Times had reported on a psychiatrist who avowed that “deep-seated psychological sicknesses of various sorts underlie the ‘vast majority’ of marriages between white persons and Negroes.” Three years later, the Times Magazine cited the career setbacks that “the white husband in an interracial marriage” could expect. He should not hope to “become head of A.T. & T. or I.B.M.,” though he might “find a rewarding niche in those fast-expanding areas in which his marital status would not be a matter of vast concern—in the entertainment industry, for instance, or in editorial work.” In addition, it was “typical” for interracial couples to forgo having children, out of fear of the hardships they would suffer.
Yet by 1978 thirty-six per cent of Americans thought that interracial couples should be free to marry—a number that continued to grow—and younger people were among the most likely to think so. Younger people are more approving of same-sex marriage, too. In poll after poll, the biggest divide on the issue is generational. A 2011 Gallup poll was the first in which at least half of Americans supported same-sex marriage. Fifty-three per cent were in favor, but among those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four the number rose to seventy per cent. That’s why marriage equality is a historical inevitability. The divide is a matter not of life stages but of generations: people generally do not become more conservative on this issue as they get older. The era they grow up in shapes them permanently. If you are under thirty-five, you are more likely to have come of age knowing people who were openly gay—or at least to have seen them on TV—and less likely to get the arguments against gay marriage.
And, quite honestly, what is there to get? No one has shown that allowing same-sex couples to marry undermines heterosexual marriage—or, indeed, discovered any plausible mechanism by which it would do so. Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa—the states that, along with the District of Columbia, currently recognize same-sex marriage—have not seen plummeting marital rates, or any other damaging social fallout. If the rationale for denying marital rights is that marriage is supposed to be an institution that promotes procreation, then what about infertile or deliberately childless or elderly couples, whom no one would prevent from marrying? If society has a stake in promoting family stability, gay and lesbian parents should be allowed to marry.
Still, the politics aren’t easy—last week was a reminder of that. On Sunday, as Obama put it, Vice-President Joe Biden got “a little bit over his skis,” announcing on “Meet the Press” that he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay couples marrying. On Monday and Tuesday, Obama was quiet on the subject, while calls for him to clarify his “evolving” position mounted. Also on Tuesday, voters in North Carolina approved an amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriages and civil unions. And, on Wednesday, the Administration hastily arranged an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, in which the President caught up to his second-in-command and declared his own support for same-sex marriage—a change of heart that some sources reported he was planning to declare this week on “The View,” but which Biden’s comments accelerated. (On Thursday, as if to highlight the moral drama of the moment, the Washington Post reported that Mitt Romney, who opposes same-sex marriage, had bullied a gay teen-ager at his prep school.)
Every state that has considered a ballot measure barring gay marriage has, like North Carolina, approved it, and though the margins are narrowing they remain wide. (In North Carolina, the margin was more than twenty per cent.) Such measures are helped by the fact that older people are more likely to vote and that turnout is often low (in North Carolina, it was thirty-four per cent), and by the focussed motivation of socially conservative voters. Interracial marriage would not have been approved by ballot measure, either. Because majorities do not usually vote to protect the rights of minorities, it is up to elected representatives—and, more often, the courts—to insure those rights.
There are four same-sex marriage lawsuits making their way toward the Supreme Court now. Perry v. Brown, the challenge to California’s Proposition 8, is the most ambitious and, perhaps, the least likely to succeed—at least, in its broadest aim, of establishing a national right to marry for gay couples. Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, Windsor v. United States, and Pedersen v. Office of Personnel Management—three challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, the baldly discriminatory statute that the Obama Administration has instructed its Justice Department to stop defending—have a stronger chance. These cases seek fair treatment for the hundred thousand same-sex couples who are legally married in their own states but whose marriages are not recognized by the federal government. As a result, they face the loss of insurance benefits for spouses of federal employees and members of the armed services, tax and Social Security disadvantages, and so on—in addition to the insult of being defined as second-class citizens for reasons that it would be hard to classify as anything other than prejudice.
There will be more legal challenges, too, because people will continue to want what they want and deserve what they deserve: the freedom to love whom they love and to have that love accepted. In 1956, the Supreme Court declined to take a case challenging interracial-marriage laws; by 1967, it had to. And, eventually, the Court will do the right thing on same-sex marriage, just as the President did last week. As in the Loving decision, the Court will reaffirm that the “freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” And it will finally uphold that freedom for gay and lesbian Americans. ♦
