Gay rights activists have been disappointed with the pace of the president’s gay rights agenda. The recent Prop 8 decision that will forever bear the name of an action star-turned-governator has also brought activist attention on the president at a particularly crucial, penis-shaped moment:
The LOESS regression line now shows 50 percent opposed to gay marriage and 49 percent in support — basically too close to call.
What you see in the chart up there is a social shift. As my friend Chez Pazienza would say, the right has already lost this fight; Adam and Steve are out of the closet, they’re fabulous, and they’re not going back in. More importantly, everyone knows it. All that people like Fred Phelps accomplish is to make noise about it. Gay wedding bells will drown them out better than any counter-protest.
It really is all over but the shouting. But it comes at a perilous time for the president, who doesn’t want to alienate the Christian right — indeed, according to the left, he has spent too much political capital holding out olive branches only to have his hand smacked away. When will his timid staff twist arms, call names, and attack, dang him?
What they understood that Obama and his staff did not understand is that to the right, politics is the continuation of war by other means, and that the creature hiding underneath a collapsing conservative movement is an ugly fundamentalism that does not make compromises.
The president probably won’t have the luxury of waiting until 2012 to maneuver on this issue. He has been consistently, gently negative about the subject — “not in favor” — which isn’t the same thing as “opposed.” Expect the inverse — “not opposed” — to emerge soon. If marriages restart in California next week, expect the White House to be ‘happy for the people of California’ or some such blather.
Don’t expect an explicit endorsement. Social evolution (that’s what the graph shows) can bring harder reaction when it becomes revolutionary (see the helmet-defining bump in the graph? That’s the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision). Rather than start waves, this White House prefers to ride them.
