Same-Sex Marriage, Take Three

Last take for a while on the SSM front.

American society doesn't often change very quickly. Well, sure, transformative changes like the Louisiana Purchase or WWII or state-sponsored genocide or the invention of the Internet can have a sudden impact on any nation. But attitudes don't shift overnight. If this country's population heavily endorses one side of an issue, its mind stays made up for a long time.

This was true regarding the women's right to vote, of interracial marriage, of Sunday liquor laws. Those restrictions on freedom took a long time to eradicate. Decades, generations, lifetimes. (In the case of booze regulation, the fight rages on in several parts of the country, somehow. The mind boggles, as it often does during post-making. What's so special about Sunday that state governments should step in and curb whiskey sales during those hours?)

Focus! The same national resistance to change remains true, to this day, on issues like capital punishment. For decades now, Americans have agreed that the death penalty ought to remain in place, to be applied in certain murder cases. Some national soul-searching in the 1960s notwithstanding, the numbers say we historically do not mind a good-n-bloody execution once in a while:

Thanks to gallup.com for that nugget, which can be found here. But like I was saying, social mores don't abruptly do a 180-degree turn. It takes generations to accomplish great things like abolition, restoration of civil rights, anti-discrimination laws. Sometimes the battle can't be won, and the government gets to keep killing people. Mostly guilty people. Mostly.

But this post isn't actually about the happy subject of capital punishment. Focus!

You know what's bucking the trend, and changing faster than a really really fast-changing thing? Americans' attitudes toward same-sex marriage. And it's moving the right direction, steamrolling the opposition like a really really strong fast thing, one equipped with steamrolling capabilities. (Help me, Simile Metaphor People.)

Before the pretty graph, some pretty numbers, culled from my online sojourns:

Americans endorsing interracial marriage (Gallup poll)
1973 ---- 29 percent
1978 ---- 36
1983 ---- 43
1988 ---- 48
1993 ---- 48

Americans endorsing same-sex marriage (Gallup-Pew Research composite figures, wikipedia link)
2004 ---- 33 percent
2006 ---- 41
2008 ---- 39
2010 ---- 43
2012 ---- 49

What's different? Yeah, the increments.

Here, a graph that illustrates what I'm saying.

Fivethirtyeight.com made this one for me. Thanks, Nate Silver. As the trendlines indicate, this whole SSM hullabaloo could be solved in a short time. How short? Well, interracial marriage numbers make a good model -- once approval crested 50 percent in 1997, it began to skyrocket. Just two increments later, it passed 70; today, approval sits at 86 percent.

Let's project out a similar polling trend for gay marriage, only instead of five years at a time, let's keep using two. Try this on:
2014 ---- 53
2016 ---- 60
2018 ---- 71
2020 ---- 82

Confession -- that looks way too optimistic. Let's tone the numbers down a bit, and say that the increase will be roughly half of what interracial marriage accomplished. Perhaps, instead:
2014 ---- 52
2016 ---- 56
2018 ---- 61
2020 ---- 67

You know who's jumping ship in 2018? Just about all the SSM opponents left in office. You know what's a non-issue in 2020? Yeah, this thing that has us all in a tizzy today.

Victory over the foes of equality is attainable, and quickly. Good thing. The kids I know in households with two moms probably won't mind.