Gay marriage - the generation gap (New Yorker)

[fiorello]

This is incredible good news to any supporter of gay marriage. Excerpts:

The Lariat fracas is a small part of a large drama, but it is emblematic of an essential feature of the gay-marriage debate: the most salient divisions are not religious, political, or “cultural” but generational.

To talk to younger people is to realize that for most of them, including many young conservatives, such notions as the idea that homosexuality is shameful,... or that it is some sort of threat to something or other (public order, the family, civilization, God) are simply bizarre curios from the past.

One particularly striking CBS News/New York Times poll, taken last year, asked respondents if they would favor or oppose “a law that would allow homosexual couples to marry, giving them the same legal rights as other married couples.” Among adults under age thirty, 61 per cent said they would favor such a law and 35 per cent said they would oppose it; among sixty-five-year-olds and up, 18 per cent were in favor and 73 per cent opposed. The numbers vary from poll to poll, but the huge age gap is always there.

The trend lines are clear: at some point in the fairly near future—maybe by the time those twenty-somethings are forty-somethings—gay marriage will be routine.

The best that can be said for Bush’s sudden call for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is that, on some level, he seems ashamed of it....It is close to a certainty that no such amendment will be adopted.

Full article:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040315ta_talk_hertzberg

[truthbetold]

1. Yep.

I'm one of them crazy young-ens who thinks love is beautiful, no matter what gender you and your partner are.
I'm seeing the same kind of idea among kids my age, so I have much hope!