Glenn Reynolds has some interesting thoughts about gay marriage as a campaign issue. Bottom line — there seems to be little substantive difference between Kerry and Bush on the topic. The main difference is that Bush supports a defense of marriage amendment to the Constitution which he can do because he knows it has no chance of coming to pass (much as he has endorsed re-upping the assault weapons ban largely because he knows it’s just not going to happen).
I’ve posted before about the inconsistency of gay marriage supporters, but whether you support or oppose it, it is clear that legalization of gay marraige is all but inevitable.
Reynolds quotes Julian Sanchez as writing,
I spot the one Ben Sherman in a solidly Brooks Brothers room (actually Benetton, I discover, but Benetton trying to look like Ben Sherman) and try to suss out how gay Republicans are feeling in light of the Federal Marriage Amendment push. And his answer’s a pretty good one: That the gay rights issue is largely a generational one, and that it’ll be won inside of 10 or 15 years as a result of demographic changes regardless of which party’s in power.
In the late 1980s I was sitting in a philosophy class in which the topic had turned to forms of government and balancing civil liberties with other interests. The topic of homosexuality came up, and the professor asked how many people in the class of about 50 thought there should be laws against homosexuality. Not a single person, even the conservative Christians in the class, thought these were a good idea. To me the question was almost incomprehensible, similar to asking whether or not there should be laws against blasphemy.
It seem to me all but inevitable that laws that define marriage as only between a man and a woman are destined to fall, though I’d pushed the timeline out further to 25 years.
BTW, this is unrelated, but I got my first glimpse at just how odd this sort of tolerance is in another philosophy class. The first day of the class there were a number of Muslim women in full conservative dress. They all got up and left about 15 minutes into the course and never came back. Why? According to the instructor, this philosophy of science course would consider the implications of Big Bang cosmology on theistic arguments for the creation of the universe, and these women did not want to sit in any class in which they might have to read or consider arguments that they believed went against the Koran.