of the New York Times delivers a dispatch from the frontier of the gay-marriage debate. To summarize: the last (hopefully, maybe) big barricade of American bigotry is slowly, inevitably being knocked down.
No surprise there. The great Nate Silver predicts a majority of Americans will favor gay marriage within the next 10 years or so.
What I was taken with is some good news and some bad.
The good: Approval of the Vermont legislature’s acceptance of gay marriage has been expressed by… Glenn Beck. At least it was decided by the people, that sort of thing. Even (some of) the looniest on the right can accept social change if it isn’t shoved down our throats by the judiciary. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Also good: Silver is becoming the recognized, definitive national source for polling analysis, which shows what happens when a Sabermetrics-trained baseball guy turns his hand to something as insipid as politics.
The bad: Republicans thinking about running for President (Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin) are now to the right of, say, Rick Warren (and evidently Glenn Beck) on this issue, because in order to win the Iowa caususes on the GOP side you have to appeal to Bible-thumping fundamentalist simps whose minds are still in the 1950s. In the same way, Barack Obama, in order to win in Iowa last time, had to pretend (at least I hope he was pretending) to defend indefensible nonsense like farm price supports and ethanol.
Man, do we have a stupid process for electing a president.
