Young People Who Hate The Idea Of Gay Marriage Are Weirdly Optimistic Now
Members of the "pro-marriage" movement, many in their 20s and 30s, seem confident they could ultimately exclude gay people from getting hitched, according to The Times.
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider the issue next week, and the "pro-marriage" folks acknowledged to The Times that they might lose the case. But they likened their battle to the long-term political battle against abortion. (While the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, it's now very difficult to get an abortion in many states.)
"If you take the longer view of history — I’m not talking just 15 years, I’m talking 40 years or even 100 years — I can’t help but think that the uniqueness of man-woman marriage will be adjudicated over time,” Andrew Walker, a 27-year-old analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told The Times.
The Times reported on this strangely optimistic attitude a few days after a Republican U.S. Senator announced that he'd changed his mind about the issue after his son came out to him.
Just a couple of weeks ago, more than 75 powerful Republicans urged the Supreme Court to allow gay gay marriage after many of them had changed their stance too.
Eric Teetsel, the 29-year-old executive director of an anti-gay marriage group called The Manhattan Declaration, believes his movement can get these conservatives to change their minds again.
“I think it’s really a case where once they hear the other side of the issue," Teetsel told The Times, "and really think about it deeply, we’re going to win a lot of those folks back.”
The so-called pro-marriage movement plans to argue this point, according to The Times: If we relax the definition of marriage to include gays, then we'll also have looser standards about monogamy. And that, they argue, will lead to out-of-wedlock births.
The problem is that many of the Republicans who now favor gay marriage have already rejected the argument that letting gays in on marriage will weaken the institution. Here's what Republicans said in their brief to the Supreme Court supporting marriage:
"Marriage is strengthened, not undermined, and its benefits and importance to society as well as the support and stability it gives to children and families promoted, not undercut, by providing access to civil marriage for same-sex couples."
It's really, really hard to imagine the young gay marriage opponents getting Republicans to change their minds on this issue again. As more gay people tie the knot, it will only become clearer that they're not ruining marriage for everybody else.
As Ellen Degeneres said in her own fake amicus brief on her website: "Portia and I have been married for 4 years and they have been the happiest of my life. And in those 4 years, I don’t think we hurt anyone else’s marriage. I asked all of my neighbors and they say they’re fine."