Prop 8 and the need to go beyond 50.1%
Andrew Sullivan says he is “not shattered” by the passage of California’s Proposition 8, the ballot measure effectively overturning the state Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of gay marriage, but also that
It cannot be denied that this feels like a punch in the gut. It is. I’m not going to pretend that the wound isn’t deep and personal, like an attack on my own family. It was meant to be.
I can certainly understand why he and others would believe that the passage of Prop 8 was a real gut check. I can see why it would feel like a personal attack. But the insistence that it was intended as an attack—while no doubt a true enough description of some percentage of Prop 8’s supporters—points to the maximalist attitudes that probably gave rise to it in the first place.
Consider gay marriage opponent Rod Dreher’s take on the issue:
I don’t doubt that barring some unforeseen cataclysm, same-sex marriage is going to be the law of the land in my lifetime. If you look at the actuarial tables and the demographic charts, it’s clear that younger voters accept it. Had gay activists in California pursued a gradualist strategy building democratic support for same-sex marriage measures incrementally, they would be well on their way to getting what they want. Even though I’m against gay marriage, I could live with compromise legislation that erected a zone of protection around religious liberty. I suspect you could build a workable majority of voters who’d support something like that.
I suspect you could, too. Judging from the final tally (52%-48%), the “no” side only needed to shave off a few percentage points. Granted, some subset of the 52% are implacable foes driven more by bigotry than theology or philosophy, and yet another religiously minded subset advocate a position as maximalist as Andrew’s often comes off as. Surely some sort of concession about the need for a religious liberty protection, even a relatively toothless one, would have peeled away enough of the rest of the Prop 8 supporters to get to 50.1%.
No matter which side we’re on, we need to go beyond 50.1%, however. The problem with such razor-thin majorities, as we’ve just seen in California, is that they’re chaotic. Gays find themselves legally “married” one day, and then the next day, not. Regardless of one’s stand on the issue, this ought to be seen as an intolerable situation.
What might a long-term, stable consensus look like? It could be something as simple as “civil unions for all”—keep the law altogether away from the word “marriage” and its attendant religious and cultural connotations. I’m not sure exactly how to arrive at a successful compromise—except to say that the people who did this ad probably wouldn’t be the ones to come up with it.
UPDATE: Before I even finished writing, the speedy and eloquent Megan McArdle pointed out the obvious tactical lesson to draw from Prop 8’s passage, and the equally eloquent Andrew justified himself against the maximalist charge: “You don’t get half a loaf by asking for half a loaf. You get half a loaf by asking for the whole thing.”