In Massachusetts, Gay Marriage Turns Out to be Quite Vanilla
By Jamelle Bouie - Nov 17th, 2008 at 4:00 pmLast week on his show, Bill O’Reilly wailed that gay marriage would basically destroy the fabric of American life. Here’s the relevant quote:
O’REILLY: So you can see the debate over gay marriage is now a full fledge national battle. As talking points said last night the election of Barack Obama has emboldened secular progressives who feel it is their time. Gay marriage just the beginning. Other cultural war issues will also be in display very shortly. These include limiting gun possession, legalizing narcotics, unrestricted abortion and the revocation of the Patriot Act.
Well, it’s been five years since Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, and by O’Reilly’s timeline, Massachusetts should be a cesspool of social disorder and rampant immorality. Except for the fact that, you know, it isn’t.
A Boston Globe piece on the five-year anniversary of legal same-sex marriage shows that for most folks in Massachusetts, gay marriage isn’t anything terribly remarkable, and indeed, might even be a little boring:
Massachusetts has yet to become, as former governor Mitt Romney predicted, the “Las Vegas of same-sex marriage.” Gay marriage rates leveled off at about 1,500 a year - about 4 percent of all state marriages - in 2006 and 2007. The divorce rate in Massachusetts has remained the same - and the lowest in the country.
And only one other state now allows same-sex marriage; 30 states have a ban against it.
What’s really changed is more subtle than cosmic, more about the everyday lives of gay couples in Massachusetts than about a national transformation. Gay and lesbian couples here said they are attracting fewer startled looks when they rent cars, less consternation when they hold hands, fewer awkward questions when they visit spouses in hospital rooms.
“When we’re out together as a couple, it really doesn’t come up; we’re never challenged anymore,” said David Wilson, one of the plaintiffs in the 2003 SJC case and the current chairman of MassEquality, a gay-rights advocacy group. “It’s now considered normal.”
Although most of the people who rail loudly against gay marriage are naked bigots, I’ve always thought that the vast majority of folks–the silent majority, if you will–are driven more by discomfort and fear, not bigotry. And often, all it takes to dispel discomfort or fear is experience. In Massachusetts, a good number of people are seeing that not only do they have nothing to fear from gay people, they have nothing to fear from gay marriage. The legal recognition of same-sex marriage is, in large part, driving the social acceptance of same-sex marriage.
Moreover, this should stand as a rebuke to the argument that “activist” judicial decisions like the legalization of same-sex marriage necessarily provoke backlashes. As the Globe article notes, in the five years since the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the Massachusetts Constitution didn’t allow for the prohibition of same-sex marriage, public support for those marriages has grown considerably:
In February 2004, a survey of 400 voters found that 42 percent were in favor of same-sex marriage and 44 percent opposed it. In a similar survey completed this August, approval sprang to 59 percent and opposition sank to 37 percent, said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, which conducted the polls.
State Representative Brian P. Wallace, a Democrat from South Boston, has felt that mood in his district. Wallace, who in January 2007 voted in favor of a ban on same-sex marriage, was one of several lawmakers who changed their minds in June 2007, when the Legislature defeated a measure to put the question of marriage on the ballot.
“My constituency is changing,” he explained. Although “there’s still people who haven’t spoken to me after the vote,” most of his constituents, he said, no longer worry about same-sex marriage.
You know, when you think about it, this is what they’re afraid of. The James Dobsons, Tony Perkins, and Sarah Palins of the world fear the day when their hatreds and prejudices are a non-issue, when the majority of Americans don’t even give a second thought to the gay couple next door.
I don’t know what or how long it will take to ensure that same-sex couples around the country are able to codify their relationships and celebrate their love. But attitudes do change, our sense of what is “acceptable” changes, and I am certain that, eventually, we will consider opposition to same-sex marriage just as reprehensible as we now consider opposition to interracial marriage.
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