Here’s the map after Minnesota became the 12th state to allow gay marriage. I’m sure it’s going to get a little more blue, but in the end there’s going to be a hell of a lot of red on it. Two guys, or two women, aren’t getting married in Alabama or Kentucky in the next 50 years without some kind of federal intervention. The same was true about civil rights, and the same was true of abortion. So, while I acknowledge that she’s forgotten more about women’s rights and the law than I’ll ever know, I don’t agree with Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the politics of Roe.
The sweep and detail of the opinion stimulated the mobilization of a right-to-life movement and an attendant reaction reaction in Congress and state legislatures. In place of the trend ‘toward liberalization of abortion statutes’ noted in Roe, legislatures adopted measures aimed at minimizing the impact of the 1973 rulings, including notification and consent requirements, prescriptions for the protection of fetal life, and bans on public expenditures for poor women’s abortions.
What this misses is, for some of those states, there is no “momentum […] on the side of change” as Ginsberg argues. As long as some federal entity does something to change their beloved backwater stasis, that entity is going to be the target of hate, resentment and back-door nullification efforts. The Court or Congress should just repeal DOMA and get on with the next 50 years of seething hatred from a vocal minority. While they’re pissing and moaning, blacks will be voting, women will be controlling their own bodies, and same-sex married partners will be enjoying the same federal rights as other married couples.
Just Some Fuckhead
What’s the deal with New Mexico? Did they accidentally allow gray people to marry?
liberal
Besides being wrong on this issue, the fact she didn’t resign early in Obama’s first term is very wrong. While she might be somewhat better than someone Obama would name to replace her (my own guess, as a frequent Obama critic, is his pick would be at least marginally to the right of her), IMHO that was far outweighed by the risk that Obama wouldn’t win 2012 and she’d die in the next admin’s term.
I have an ego, too, but whatever happened to the concept of doing something right for the sake of the country?
Omnes Omnibus
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Some questions are best left unanswered.
The Moar You Know
There’s a perfect band of hatred running from North Dakota straight down to Texas, and then a band stretching from Texas to Florida and the Carolinas.
It looks like the letter “L”.
Appropriate.
Just Some Fuckhead
@liberal:
Maybe she naively thought she’d live?
PhoenixRising
It wasn’t an accident. It was on purpose, and we’re definitely married (3 court cases acknowledging this which unfortunately came in the form of contested divorces. Cause we’re not special, we’re typical.)
NM is the last state standing with a gender neutral marriage statute, since the family code was adopted at statehood 101 years ago. All efforts (34 of them in the state lege since 1996) to “fix” this to reflect opposite marriage only have been vigorously and successfully resisted.
Current events include city and county commissions pressuring county clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, along with a me-too state-level lawsuit…finally filed just as the Prop 8 case to which RBG refers in the post was being argued at SCOTUS. One thing you can’t say about NM’s official gay movement is that it’s run by radicals.
scott
I’m relatively old, I guess (45), and I’ve been hearing this theory for 30 years at least that we need to slow down on social change so that consensus can form, people’s sensibilities can evolve, etc. It seems to me that gay rights has been one of the few areas where we’ve made progress during that time because activists on that issue didn’t take that advice and made a point of being as aggressive and in-your-face as possible, including making pretty open political threats to the president about re-election support. I’m all for hearing people out if they have a good argument that social change is bad on the merits. But if they don’t, not changing because it would make them uncomfortable seems pretty dumb and shouldn’t be a claim worth thinking about.
Biff Longbotham
One of my brothers got gaymarried (term I’m borrowing from a gay friend from church) in Noo Yawk last year and it was THE BEST PARTY EVER. Those red and striped states don’t know what they’re missing.
shortstop
For cryin’ out loud, I had a conversation with the other day with a guy who earnestly insisted that, left to its own devices, the South would have eradicated slavery by 1870 at the latest. I suggested he read the articles of secession for each state and note how the perpetuation of human bondage was listed as a, usually the, reason for secession in every single case. He said that was all for show and Dixie would have done the right thing in the end.
We’re supposed to think, against the unbroken line of American history that shows the opposite, that marginalized groups can get their rights without federal intervention if they just learn some patience. No fucking thank you.
Citizen_X
@Just Some Fuckhead:
It’s part of Mexico, duh! It’s not called “New America,” is it?
shortstop
@Citizen_X: This brings up something that’s been bothering me for decades. Why is Laredo in the U.S. and Nuevo Laredo in Mexico? That’s just odd.
Just Some Fuckhead
@shortstop:
You may want to point out to him that they specifically seceded because they were afraid slavery wouldn’t be perpetuated in the new states entering the union. How they go from wanting to perpetuate slavery where it didn’t already exist to abolishing it everywhere in 10 years will be his homework.
elmo
Right now I live in Northern Virginia. My place of work is near Dulles Airport. On Saturday, my partner and I made an offer on a house in Maryland. My commute will be almost an hour and a half, each way. I don’t care. We are moving to Maryland , and taking my six-figure salary and attendant taxes with us, so that we can be married.
shortstop
@Just Some Fuckhead: Excellent point. Unfortunately, I killed him in purely distilled frustration and the conversation is over. No jury will convict me.
shortstop
@elmo: Damn right, elmo. Stick it to the Cooch and his shady-ass boss. All the best to you and your girl — happy wedding!
Just Some Fuckhead
@shortstop:
That was definitely the right choice. I just didn’t know if you had it in you. So often, we fail to immediately destroy our adversaries out of a misplaced sense of loyalty or mores and then we wind up vexed with them indefinitely.
catclub
“Two guys, or two women, aren’t getting married in Alabama or Kentucky in the next 50 years without some kind of federal intervention.”
This is changing far faster than the race issue,
and less than 50 years ago, people were still saying the world would end if people of the wrong color were in the same swimming pool.
I suspect that the federal action will come first, though, and then it will become normal in many places where it is hard to imagine.
Example: The Episcopal Church in Mississippi is not as implacably opposed to blessing same sex unions ( nope, not marriages yet, but hey) as you might think.
shortstop
@Just Some Fuckhead: I’m a pacifist six days a week. He picked the wrong one to bring this up.
MomSense
@elmo:
Congratulations!!
aimai
Its a crazy comparison–abortion rights are not at all like the right to marry. For one thing abortion remains a fairly secret medical practice so although millions of women have had abortions very few of them are willing to publicly challenge the anti abortion movement or stand up for the procedure or female autonomy. Gay rights as they are now understood are extremely public and people are forced to pick sides. While abortions happen in every family and in every class/community once you’ve had one it becomes a secret while gay marrying your lover in MA has a huge knock on effect on all your family all over the country. Sure, some people will continue to take a hard line anti gay marriage stance but over time this will become impossible socially–meanwhile people will go out of state to get married and then either stay out of state or come back to the state and sue under the full faith and credit clause. So the force placed on state legislatures is completely different.
Different state laws for abortion provision result in driving the practice underground and crippling and depoliticizing the affected population (immiserated poor women, dragging upper class women out of the public fight and into private provisioning). Different laws regarding gay marriage will simply increase gay/upper class/wealth flight from certain states. This will harden the political will of the remaining bigots but it will increase the cultural capital and the human capital of the states where gay marriage is legal. In that its no different than anything else driving low population/high misery states further into the red zone and moving high population/high tolerance states to be bluer.
ruemara
I think that, unfortunately, RBG gets to feel this way due to class, race and educational privilege. I disagree, because I have live out in the world that she does not.
Roger Moore
@scott:
I think that abortion is actually the exception in terms of backlash. Yes, there was obvious backlash to most of the civil rights decisions, but that backlash has gotten weaker with time. Very few people would be willing to stand up in public and suggest that we should go back to segregated schools and put blacks at the back of the bus. Even fewer people would suggest that we should reinstate miscegenation laws. Even school prayer is dying down as an issue. There really doesn’t seem to be any kind of generalized rule that enforcement of equal rights by court order creates a terrible backlash, and we shouldn’t act as if there is.
Schlemizel
My assumption (because I don’t expect better of humans) is that Minnesota may not remain blue after the next election. I assume the DFLs tenuous hold on the majority will slip away and the only roadblock with be a spineless Governor Dayton. He most likely will veto the legislation to rescind but I am not convinced the Dems can hold that position. Dayton is a weak candidate and he may lose support from the morans on the Iron Range that made him the DFL candidate last election.
Don’t get me wrong, I am glad they did the right thing I just don’t think this is a done deal and that there will not be a terrible price to pay. Remember our last 3 Govs where a cut-throat R who sold off profitable portions of public services thereby providing a small amount of money but leaving the State poorer, the not-actually-a-navy-seal-but-wannabe ‘libertarian’ who squandered the surplus on a tax cut on licensing for his motorized toys and Tiny Tim Pawlenty, who did more damage than his predecessors.
We are going to have a hell of a fight on our hands here
mai naem
I’m not sure abortion and gay marriage/rights should be looked at the same way. I agree with Ginsburg on abortion because I think abortion would have become more accepted in the 70s and the gradual chipping at abortion rights may not have happened. Gay marriage, though, has to be national. What happens if you’re gay married in NY and go on vacation in New Orleans and your partner ends up in the hospital? WTF? Your partner’s redneck family comes in and takes over hospital rights because you’re in LA? Or you’re gay married in NY and your partner moves to Tenn. for a quicker liver transplant and dies? Do you lose your partner’s SS benefits? This is one issue where the basic stuff has to be standard through the country.
Schlemizel
@elmo:
Bless you! I hope more people take this attitude & the troglodytes pay for their stupidity.
Tom_B
What Ginsberg overlooks is that people have little choice over what state they live in; you follow the jobs. If I were a woman stuck moving to a dumb-a$$ state, why should I have go out if state to get medical care? With gay marriage, why should a person tolerate the expense of losing partner benefits because he/she might live in a red “nanny state”?
shortstop
@ruemara: Yes, and she’s usually pretty good — very good, actually — at getting how most people live, so this is especially disappointing.
Squarely Rooted
Worth noting – it’s now more than 16% of the population living in states that have full equality and 40% living in states that have at least something approaching equality. While nothing short of full, national equality is acceptable in the final analysis, we should measure progress on the human scale, not the state-by-state scale, even though that’s where we have to fight the battles.
shortstop
@Squarely Rooted: And if Prop 8 stays down and Illinois squeaks this bill through our house, more than a third of Americans will live in states with full marriage equality. Even more if another Great Migration gets underway. ;)
belieber
When mistermux & co. are not reacting to GOP propaganda they are obsessing over teh gays. How embarassing that sites like this are supposedly somewhat representative of progressives….sigh.
Tom_B
@Roger Moore: “Very few people would be willing to stand up in public and suggest that we should go back to segregated schools and put blacks at the back of the bus”. Explain that to the NAACP when the GOP comes in to charterize their school system.
Sasha
I don’t know that she’s necessarily wrong. It could be that if more states approved gay marriage, we reach a tipping point where a Supreme Court decision wouldn’t cause a backlash. I’m also thinking that in the absence of DOMA, assuming the court finds against it, the “Full Faith and Credit” clause comes back into force. Even when miscegenation was illegal in many states, interracial marriages that occurred in other states were still valid. What the Lovings did, IIRC, is leave Virginia to get married in another state and then move back to Virginia.That is why they were tried and convicted.
Chris
@shortstop:
Every time I hear one of these shits whine about something like that, it reminds me of the little kid screaming “but MAAAA! I was GONNA pick up my room! Honest!” You believe that? Neither does he.
Roger Moore
@aimai:
It’s not just the public vs. private bit that makes a difference. It’s also that abortion is an event of quite limited duration, while gay marriage- and any other aspect of being an out of the closet gay, while you’re at it- is an ongoing status. If your state restricts abortion, you can avoid the restrictions by crossing state lines to some place with more favorable laws. The same thing doesn’t work for marriage; if your state doesn’t recognize it, it’s invalid no matter where it’s performed. People who want their marriage recognized are forced to fight for it even if they’d rather live and let live.
beltane
@Tom_B: Not to mention people like Jason Richwine and his conservative think tank brethren who are always there in the wings with studies that support a white supremacist agenda.
Citizen_X
@shortstop: Laredo was founded in 1755, so it was in Mexico. And then, per Wikipedia:
So it is newer.
shortstop
@Citizen_X: And to think I could have gotten off my arse and spent 30 seconds finding that out for myself. Thanks, Citizen X! You’re a good egg.
Steve M.
“Is,” not “was.” Or “will soon once again be.”
Sloegin
Whenever I get a little hopeful, I look at this Gallup survey.
It took until the mid-90s for a plurality to get behind Loving v. Virginia. Faster change will only happen through the courts.
Nicole
I could see her argument (and agreed that the decision was poorly based in that it focused on doctors and privacy and not on a woman’s right to equality) but she forgets the big issue- that thousands of women were dying every year from botched illegal abortions. There are women today alive because of the Supreme Court’s “premature” decision. The nation had a century-long experiment with abortion being illegal, and it didn’t work out so well. It was a health crisis. One parts of this nation seem eager to reinstate.
Patricia Kayden
@shortstop: You should have asked him how come it took so long for the South to let Blacks drink from “White” fountains and sit at the front of the bus and eat in integrated restaurants, etc. The South had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.
Steve M.
And Republicans will be persuading heartlanders in 99% Christian towns that “forced gay marriage” causes recessions, tornadoes, floods, and terrorist attacks. A thesis that will be believed.
Roger Moore
@Tom_B:
But the point is that nobody in the GOP can actually stand up and say we should overturn Brown v. Board of Education. Yes, there was backlash and there are still revanchists who want to go back to segregation, but things are getting better. The people who are trying to resegregate are a minority and they know it; that’s why they have to speak in dogwhistles and try to achieve their objectives by stealth. It’s not like abortion, where the backlash was muted at first and has been getting stronger and more brazen by the year.
Shakezula
Good old “I Told You to Go Slow.” It must be the most passive aggressive bullshittiest parade pissing just plain mean argument against any kind of change or indication that we can make the world slightly less shitty for more people ever uttered.
It calls on people to feel bad about a nice thing they have, while ignoring how really not fun things were before the nice thing came to be.
I can’t say I’m surprised to hear it from someone as intelligent as Ginsberg, it just seems some people are wired to think that way and linked more to empathy than intellectual smarts.
But now that I am a bit more mature I don’t want to hit people who blurt out ITYtGS. I just want to read them Letter from a Birmingham Jail. In their ear. Through a megaphone. Truth hurts.
shortstop
@Steve M.: Natural disasters sent by god are always popular with the religious right, but the current favorite prediction of doom is that Christians are being denied the “free exercise of religion,” a clear violation of the first amendment. To have true religious freedom, you see, you must be able to continue freely discriminating against gay people in your otherwise-open-to-the-public business or your tax dollar-receiving social services organization.
liberal
@Just Some Fuckhead:
But there’s not much upside to her having stayed on the court, and a lot of potential downside.
Jockey Full of Malbec
@Patricia Kayden:
FTFY.
catclub
@Tom_B: This. Also because economic segregation works very well to create the racial segregation that matters to upper middle class ( and higher) whites who want it.
shortstop
@Patricia Kayden: I was having trouble controlling my temper as it was. I know damn well the answer would be that although slavery was wrong, people really ought to have the ability to run “their” towns and businesses as they see fit.
sparrow
@catclub: But aren’t the episcopalians the wide-eyed liberals of the christian set? I mean, if they’re on board that’s great but it might not signify that the southern baptists are becoming any less regressive.
Just Some Fuckhead
@liberal:
Maybe she was looking at it like a paycheck or something else self-serving.
Yatsuno
@belieber: Shorter Durf: shut up fags!
techno
@Schlemizel:
I live in Minnesota and I think the gay marriage issue is OVER. It died a little when that constitutional amendment lost. It died some more when the Lutherans decided to make it possible to have gay clergy. And it will really die when Minnesotans get a whiff of how fabulous gay weddings will be.
This is a state where just surviving is a real hassle. It doesn’t take long but soon you begin to judge people based on what sort of neighbors they are. My experience has been that gays make superb neighbors. In the end, I am pretty sure that this will be all that matters.
beltane
@Just Some Fuckhead: All retired federal judges receive full salary for life. Federal district and appeals court judges can take senior status with a much reduced caseload, but get to keep their staff and chambers but this is not an option for Supreme Court justices.
mainmati
@shortstop: When the Republic of Texas was formed in 1836, Laredo was in the new republic so the Laredans who were on the other side of thew Rio Grande set up a new version of Laredo. Hence the name. The two Laredos are actually considered one metropolitan area.
liberal
@Just Some Fuckhead:
No, best guess is what I said before: ego.
jl
I remember reading that the South has the highest proportion of households that consist of gay couples with kids. The explanation was that this fact was due to social mores, people tend to get married in the South younger than other places, and more social pressure to conform to traditional heterosexual standards. So a lot of people not naturally suited to it, try out the hetero nuclear family thing and it doesn’t work out, so they give up get divorced (which is bigger in the South than in the more degenerate and debauched ‘anit-traditional-marriage’ sin pots of the country, aka, everywhere else) and set up same sex parent household with kids from the marriage.
So, there is a fifth column of tolerance in the South. Not sure whether that will speed legalization of humane family and marriage laws there. But human nature is working its way in the South, just like everywhere else.
MikeJ
@mai naem: I disagree that abortion rights would have been more accepted in the 70s. When Roe v Wade was settled the Southern Baptist Convention was pro choice. They only changed their minds on theology when it helped their politics.
liberal
@sparrow:
Wife is currently a pretty liberal Roman Catholic. “Catholic Lite” (Episcopal) sounds much less harmful to the universe to me. When I’ve brought this up before I mention all her many, many male gay friends. (Seems like almost everyone she knew at her Jesuit undergrad institution was gay, the men I mean, if anecdotes are data.)
liberal
@Tom_B:
I agree, though I think in the long run there will be an evolution where the better jobs and more motivated people move out of the red state shitholes.
Monala
@aimai: There are other differences between abortion and marriage equality. With abortion, the “it harms babies” argument will resonate with some people. It’s much harder to make the case that someone’s gay marriage harms anyone else. So the anti-marriage equality folks are left with arguing that it harms tradition. People won’t rally to protect tradition the way they rally to protect babies.
Cassidy
@elmo: Awesome. Congrats and make sure you send that shithead a letter telling him.
@shortstop: Well, the South would have eleiminated slavery on it’s own…when the slaves rose up and slaughtered the white people in a slave revolt.
The biggest problem with that map is that all the military bases are in the red states.
Maus
“What this misses is, for some of those states, there is no “momentum […] on the side of change” as Ginsberg argues.”
More in line with the Ron Paul obsessives who claim that it’s wrong to protect rights, because it’ll just make some racist hatemonger mad and mobilized versus them just persecuting their victims regularly.
Matt McIrvin
What I find fascinating is to compare that map to THIS map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Public_opinion_of_same-sex_marriage_in_USA_by_state.svg
Note all the states where there is apparently majority support AND a constitutional ban. Those states will flip more slowly, but they’ll flip within several years. For the states where there’s just not majority opposition, it might take longer.
But, yeah, you’re probably right about Kentucky and Alabama.
Meanwhile, Fred “Slacktivist” Clark has been arguing for years that the Roe v. Wade backlash narrative of the politicized evangelical religious right is essentially a fiction, invented post-hoc in the late 70s-early 80s to provide them with a more widely popular moral narrative and a basis for allying with Catholics. The main thing that actually drew them into politics was probably the revocation of tax-exempt status for racially segregated religious schools.
dexwood.
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Greys. NM allows gay Greys to marry.
replicnt6
@dexwood.:
Important source of revenue around Area 51.
scav
@dexwood.: Worse of the worst on the defying reproduction! as the sole basis, meaning and purpose of any marriage as defined by the loving (sic) deity.
SatanicPanic
@shortstop: This is like those idiot libertarians who argue that the market would have eventually led to desegregated lunch counters, despite the market not having done that for almost 100 years.
Schlemizel
@techno:
Let me guess, you live within 35 miles of either St. Paul or Minneapolis, right?
Yes, I like my gay neighbors and have for years. But I also know people that live in Stearns, Crow WIng, Blue Earth and a couple of other counties. Granted there are not many DFL reps from those places but I expect to lose a few and probably a couple of the goopers that voted aye. The Iron Range will turn on Dayton; how badly is yet to be seen.
We are just going to have to work harder to flip some of the suburbs and hang on for dear life I think
gene108
I don’t know much about the abortion rights movement prior to Roe v. Wade, but the backlash to it has been very lasting and damaging to the country.
From what little I know, I don’t think the pro-choice movement was ever as big and in-your-face as the Civil Rights movement or the gay rights movement; so I don’t think it’s comparable to the Civil Rights movement and the gay rights movement.
The NAACP was founded in 1909 or so. They had been pushing for desegregation and racial equality for 40+ years prior to Brown v. Board of education. Brown v. Board of Education wasn’t even the first desegregation case Thurgood Marshall successfully argued before the Supreme Court.
You also have the Democratic Party in 1948 making Civil Rights a part of their platform, along with Harry Truman desegregating the military.
The pump had been primed, so to speak, for Martin Luther King, Jr. to move civil rights to a more public level in 1956, with both legislative victories and other moves to knock down racial barriers, such as Jackie Robinson and other early black MLB baseball players.
The gay rights movement got a big jolt in the 1980’s, when they had to organize and push for AIDS to be addressed. They got a legislative victory (of sorts) and attention that they exist and should have rights like any other American, with the passage of DADT, in the early 1990’s.
I know a lot of folks bitch and moan about DADT, but DADT made being gay and in the military somewhat legal, which is an improvement over the 100% illegal to be gay and in the military that was the law prior to DADT’s passage.
The gay rights movement kept pushing and in the last 10 years, public sentiment towards gay marriage has improved. People have been gay marrying in several states and the world didn’t end.
Gays can now openly serve in the military and there isn’t any hint of the backlash that went from Clitnon’s pushing for full inclusion in the military to settling for DADT.
If the Supreme Court made a move on gay marriage, such as striking down DOMA, I think more groundwork has been done for gay rights that the sort of backlash that exists against Roe v. Wade isn’t going to build, since there have been so many victories for gay rights in the last 15 years.
jibeaux
I agree with some of the commenters that you can’t put abortion and marriage equality in the same pot. I can’t speak to the Monday morning quarterbacking on Roe, but the very rapid (for a society) changes on marriage equality is sui generis. Opinions on abortion and just about everything else for the matter move much more glacially. Public opinion on marriage equality is only going one way. Even in places where I agree the change is not coming soon — unfortunately for me I live in state that just amended the wrong way last year — there will probably be majority opinion for change in the next decade, although our legislature will undoubtedly drag their feet. That kind of sea change is not going to happen with any other issue that I can see.
dexwood.
@replicnt6: That’s in Nevada, NM has Roswell.
Roger Moore
@Cassidy:
I’m not sure if that’s a problem or an opportunity. Since the end of DADT, the military has been moving pretty damn quickly to accept gays, including gay couples. Some of those gay couples are going to get married when they’re at one of the remaining military bases in the blue states, or when they’re on leave, or something. That’s going to give the military a reason to defend married gay couples in those red states, and given the prestige of the military in red states that may make a difference.
Roger Moore
@replicnt6:
FTFY. Area 51 is actually in Nevada; they had to bring the alien spaceship from Roswell to Area 51.
techno
@Schlemizel:
Busted! Yes I live just about exactly 35 miles from Mpls/St. Paul—in a pretty little college town where the constitutional amendment went down by about 75% of the vote. But I have lived in some of those other places like Cottonwood Co. My experience is that the only people who actually care about this issue are the closet queens. For the really straight, gay people and how they live their lives don’t even make it on their radar—it’s FAR less of an issue than whether their snowblower starts when its cold.
gbear
@Schlemizel:
I respectfully disagree. We may wind up with a GOP majority in the house and/or senate again, but the genie is out of the bottle on gay marriage. Seven months ago, a constitutional ban on gay marriage couldn’t get a majority of voters. If the GOP tries to pull that stunt again when there are married couples who’s marriage will become annulled, they are going to look like extremists (and that perception will be correct) and they’ll know they’re going to get their asses hauled into court. I don’t think we’re going to have to go through what CA is going through.
The haters are always going to hate (the comment section for today’s gay marriage story in the PiPress is VERY colorful today. There are a couple of epic meltdowns in progress), but I don’t think the haters are going to be able to take this one back.
MomSense
I guess I would challenge the assumption that Justice Ginsberg is making in that I don’t think the backlash is because of Roe v. Wade. I think the abortion issue was/has been used cynically to win elections–local, state and national. St. Ronaldus didn’t become anti-abortion until he had national political aspirations. In terms of gay rights and marriage equality, this is also an issue that was/is exploited by Republicans seeking office to turn out voters. The reason there were so many state constitutional amendments defining marriage on the ballot in 2000 and 2004 was because Rove needed the evangelicals to turn out big in those states.
I think public opinion on both issues is changing. The Obama campaign and Democrats were smart in the last election to bundle abortion rights with women’s health and reproductive access. Obama was especially effective in the message that women’s access to reproductive health care is an economic issue. I heard support on a number of calls to voters who are not exactly pro abortion rights who were persuaded by that argument.
We still have a lot to do in terms of access to abortion services especially for low income women. Travel times, waiting periods, and the cost of the procedure itself are prohibitive. And I guess I would just say fuck it–who cares if there is a backlash. If Roe v. Wade had been limited we would still be fighting. This is the nature of the fight to expand rights in this country. It is always a damned fight.
aimai
@Steve M.: I just don’t agree. They will continue to make that argument–but to a smaller and smaller crowd of true believers. Why? Because pretty shortly everyone willl know out gay people and will like them, will have gay relatives they don’t want to hide or attack, or live in a city or town or state with gay marriage and be EXTREMELY PISSED OFF to be targeted for the hate bomb that right wing “gays made god attack us” used to work for.
Look: they said exactly the same thing after 9/11 and Katrina. I’m not saying that there isn’t a core of true believers and fanatics who don’t prefer to believe god steps in and punishes the US and specifically the blue states and gays with plagues, bombs, and hurricanes. But when tornadoes flatten the next red state town I think damned few people picking through the rubble are going to be thrilled to be told “its god’s judment on you.” People really hate that shit–they don’t mind saying ait about someone else’s misfortunes, but they hate having their own misfortunes treated that way.
Gay marriage is going to end most overt homophobic bigotry and even, in twenty years, end fundraising on the backs of gay marriage and gays generally. There are just too many mixed families for this not to be the case. And it already is the case in states where they have legalized it. People’s opposition to it plummets once its the law. People’s opposition to abortion would have plummeted too if there hadn’t been a concerted effort to criminalize the procedure and remove it from hospitals in the first place. Believer you me if hospitals had seen abortion as a profit center the anti abortion crowd would never have gotten a toe hold in most states. The corporate powers that be would have let people pray and open “adoption referral centers” but we never would have seen the defacto erosion of abortion rights we have seen.
brettvk
@aimai: I think a lot of the difference between abortion and gay marriage as culture war issues are gender-based: that is, demonizing Roe v Wade played easily into long-time fear of women’s sexuality and control issues a lot of het men won’t admit to. I think these are almost lizard-brain reactions, they’re so easily provoked. A gay couple kissing, OTOH, evokes the ick factor less viscerally, especially among straight women, while two women interacting is a positive stimulus for a lot of people.
Matt McIrvin
@aimai:
Iowa is the great exception: most of the motion there seems to have happened before same-sex marriage was legalized, and there is still not majority support, though there may be a bare plurality and people don’t seem to want a fight over a ban amendment.
Could rural Minnesota outside of the Minneapolis/St. Paul area follow more the Iowa pattern?
Barry
(I’m skipping over most of the comments; please forgive me if this has been covered).
There was no Roe backlash; Ginsburg is lying.
See Fred Clarke’s blog Slacktivist on Patheos for a start. In short, the ‘backlash’ was something dreamed up by the evangelical/fundamentalist right over civil rights.
Gex
@scott: This is correct. HRC was opposed to the marriage cases. There are lots of people who were willing to tell us to slow down, now is not the time, etc. They aren’t entirely wrong in that it ISN’T the biggest issue. Fortunately human beings can work on more than one issue. And fortunately many other people came to realize that while it isn’t the biggest issue facing the country, a person’s home life is a very big issue in a different, very human way.
Chris
@Monala:
I’ve always thought the “save the babies” angle on abortion was how they helped themselves sleep at night despite all the disenfranchised people they gleefully fuck over.
Sure, we want poor people to die in the streets for lack of health care and will actually give Ron Paul a standing ovation when he calls for that. Sure, we want minimum wage and laughably inadequate labor rights to be abolished so that the people at the bottom of the food chain can have it ever worse. Sure, we want defenseless populations bombed on a yearly basis because America Fuck Yeah. Sure, we want prisoners to be brutally tortured and denied every semblance of a human right. Sure, we think black people’s right to have rights should have been put to a vote to make sure their oppressors approved of it. Are we sociopaths, then? Well, no. How could we be sociopaths? We’re fighting for babies’ right to live. Liberals are the monsters who want to kill them all. Surely that means they’re the sociopaths, not us.
Maybe I’m over-psychoanalyzing, but I’ve always thought that was a big part of the appeal of the abortion issue to them. It helps them look at themselves in the mirror despite how foul they are in so many other ways.
Cassidy
@Roger Moore: Or it gives them a deep pool of weapons, ammo, and armor should they bring their fever dreams to life and become seccessionists.
Chris
@SatanicPanic:
The reason the market didn’t do that for almost a hundred years, beyond white racism per se, is that any business owner who even tried to desegregate knew that he could immediately expect every other business in town to be closed to him, his church and pretty much every other social circle as well, the sheriff and mayor’s offices would start harassing him and, as a last resort (or first, depending on how bored they were), the Ku Klux Klan would come by and explain to him the facts of life.
It wasn’t a “free market,” but then, it never is. The entire power structure has its thumb on the scales to make sure the people on the bottom never get what they’re owed.
TriassicSands
I’m not exactly an optimist when it comes to the Benighted States of Amurka (the deep South, Texas, and some of the northern plains and Rocky Mountain states (Idaho, Utah, etc.), but 50 years is a long time, especially on an issue that is changing as fast as this one. I wouldn’t be foolish enough to bet real money on Alabama or Mississippi doing something enlightened on matters of human rights, particularly on an issue where the Bible is being used as the spiked club of bigotry, but young people have a way of getting older and being followed by even more young people, and generally speaking, that bodes well for marriage equality. I won’t be around to check the outcome of this issue, but given fifty years, I think even Albania, errr, I mean, Alabama may come around.
Roger Moore
@Cassidy:
Only if you assume the military will turn them over without a fight.
Cassidy
@Roger Moore: Of course not, but it’s hard to go on the offensive in the midst of large amounts of dependents.
feebog
@ Schlemizel:
I don’t live in MN, but I think you are looking at the short term rather than the long term. Young people just don’t have the homophobic hang ups that people in our generation do (I’m guessing you and I are about the same age). Look at the demographics nationwide, older white folks are dying off at a rate of about 2 percent of the electorate each four years. I just don’t see any state regressing once same sex marriage is in place.
Baron Elmo
Gay marriage can’t last as a GOP issue. There are too many young Republicans who simply don’t see the big deal, who have gay friends and acquaintances. Meghan McCain is a more accurate harbinger of the conservative future than Maggie Gallagher.
The overturning of DADT was a major blow for gay rights (which is the real reason why wingnuts opposed it so vigorously), and once more prominent queer athletes begin come out, more and more Americans will cease to believe that faggots are tarnishing us in the eyes of Jesus. The real sign of change, however, will be when a prominent NASCAR celeb or a big-time country singer goes public. Heads will explode, but attitudes will change.
Finally, didn’t Nate Silver predict that the last two gay marriage holdout states will be Alabama and Mississippi, both giving up the fight around 2023? After the last election, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on damn near anything.
Chris
@TriassicSands:
I suspect what’ll actually happen is that the feds (act of Congress, Supreme Court decision, who knows) will give them the kick in the ass to finally force them over the edge like they did with segregation. After that, allow one full generation to pass. And then, they’ll finally start saying that they were totally for gay rights all along and Democrats were the real homophobes, pointing to Michael Bloomberg versus some red state Blue Dogs to prove their case.
That’s how you know you’ve won. Not when the majority of the public agrees with you, not when the law of the land agrees with you, but when even your enemies start to claim that it was totally their idea all along.
catclub
@TriassicSands: But I think the federal action will come first, so I decided not to make the bet.
I also agree that the nation is changing fast, probably faster than it changed on race.
Halcyon
Can we please stop pretending that there was a backlash as a result of Roe v. Wade? Because there wasn’t. It didn’t happen that way. Evangelicals would like to pretend it did, because it gives them cover. But it’s not true. It didn’t happen that way. The backlash was against Green v. Connelly, which stripped Bob Jones U. of it’s tax status if it continued to discriminate racially. At the time of Roe, most of the evangelicals *supported it.* It’s not even hard to find their statements on the matter.
Here, here’s Slacktivist pointing out that actual history does not look that. It wasn’t until later, when they joined with the Catholics to form the Moral Majority, that abortion became a big deal retroactively. Backlash to the decision wasn’t actually a thing that happened until much later.