The Other Side links it with marriage rights, that’s what’s making it harder. The enemies of justice never fight fairly, which is why its victories are so precious.

This just tells me that marriage equality, even nation-wide civil unions are a far distant fantasy.

The 1% popular shift in favor per year is still something. The 50% support point comes between 2016 and 2020.

There are a whole bunch of generational demographic, and ideological bloc cracking points that going to coincide and run into each other in 2017-2018. The ferment, reactionary anxiety, and sense of profound shift means that a lot is going to happen then.

The U.S. will be a different country after that. The pre-1941/45 society and its beliefs and conventions (and its issues and reasons) will in essence pass out of living memory and political relevance at that point. At the same time the people who hanker for the 1945-1968 society or give it the benefit of the doubt as significantly desirable will become a minority in the electorate.

The former is significant for gay people because it means that social reactionary organizations will ‘crack’, i.e. no longer be able to maintain internal unity about ‘sodomy’/gay sex. The second is significant because it correlates with opposition to gay marriage.

But a lot of other things will change, too. The far side of the 1941/45 line had solid cultural consensus of opposition to racial mixing, white privilege, and Eurocentrism. The far side of the 1968 line had solid cultural consensus about privileging Christianity, opposing social democracy, and women and gay people as second class citizens. And then there’s the generation line at roughly 1993, which at that point will separate a quarter or so of the electorate from the rest and they will be consolidating their views to yet another degree more Modern than that of GenX/Yers.

I think people perceive a self-interest aspect to the DADT issue, but not on marriage, for example. And that is where we have to educate the public on how full equality and acceptance of gays benefits all of society. Imagine a society where gay men feel no inclination to deceive themselves and women into dysfunctional marriages that usually end badly – now that is good for everyone.

This just tells me that marriage equality, even nation-wide civil unions are a far distant fantasy.