Thanks everyone for refreshing my memory. I wasn’t sure Prop 8 was against or for gay marriage but the news made it seems like it was pro.
Regarding AIDS, it is now a chronic disease and not a deadly disease as it was years ago.
What I love to see is the sea change that has happened in our culture, making this ruling finally possible. When I see my WASP Republican 84 year old parents discussing the wedding of their granddaughter to her TG fiancee I know we’re in a different social climate than the one in which I was raised.
When I think of all the “maiden lady roommates” and “funny bachelors” I knew growing up I imagine them in their rockers cheering on the SCOTUS decision.
My uncle has still not come out to his family. All of the “kids” (my sibs and I and cousins) have known he was gay for decades, but his parents and siblings insisted (and still do) that he has just “never met the right girl.” He is in his late 60s, and I’ve always felt bad that he apparently has never felt okay to just say it already. I thought when his father died he might have felt free to finally come out, but he never has.
Yes, you have. That part of my comment was not directed at you. It was a general comment in reply to some of the millenial comments. Sorry that wasn’t clear.
@Nrdsb4 , that is truly a sad story.
Amusing link:
http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/a-30-second-guide-to-how-gay-marriage-ruling-affects-you/
@ucbalumnus linked to Nate Silver’s new article about how popular opinion has changed on marriage equality oven the years. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/change-doesnt-usually-come-this-fast/
Silver predicted back in 2009 that the percent of people favoring it would continue to increase about 2% per year. He provided a list of when to voters in each state would vote against a marriage ban. There were 12-16 states left from 2015 on. Of course, he deals in polling, not in judicial cases, which sped the process. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/will-iowans-uphold-gay-marriage/
In the new article, he shows that views have been changing by 2.5% per year since 2005, and that much of the change has been due to people changing their minds, rather than just the aging of the population.
(Checking) Nope, nothing in my marriage has changed since yesterday. I think we are good here!
I have a friend with a sister in her mid 40s who has a female companion who lives with her and same thing - no one will just come out and say they are a couple and that they are gay.
“My uncle has still not come out to his family. All of the “kids” (my sibs and I and cousins) have known he was gay for decades, but his parents and siblings insisted (and still do) that he has just “never met the right girl.” He is in his late 60s, and I’ve always felt bad that he apparently has never felt okay to just say it already. I thought when his father died he might have felt free to finally come out, but he never has.”
When my cousin finally came out he complained that nobody was surprised. But we were all like, “About time you admitted it, we’ve known for years.”
In both my and my husband’s families we each have someone we believe to be asexual - of course none of our business really - but just bringing it up because that’s another possibility in the range of sexual preferences.
In my original culture, there were plenty of people who never got married. Maybe some didn’t think it’s worth it to marry, perhaps some are asexual, which is a term I learned here.
Just want to point out that the millennials are so open and accepting for a large part because that is how we raised them.
I grew up in a small town in the midwest. Conservative and heavily Catholic. My facebook feed shows overwhelming support for the SCOTUS decision from my friends/family members there.
True, @GCmom. i feel like I tried to raise my kids based on certain ideas about how things should be, and to my kids, those ideas are now just the way things are.
@FallGirl , that’s interesting.
What I’ve noticed is that the friends who I knew would be celebrating this news certainly are doing so. However, many of those who I went to HS with in NJ who I suspected would not, are remarkably silent. Only one has surprised me, and she wasn’t a total surprise.
After a very dark week last week, this has been a week our country can be quite proud of. It will be remembered for a long time.
Someone asked me why I thought there had been so much resistance to same sex marriage and also why it evolved so fast, and I tried to think about it in historical context. Some of it no doubt was people of sincere religious belief, who think same sex marriage violates direct religious belief, but I think for many of those opposed to it it was something different. People were brought up, much as people were brought up to think of blacks, as these other, these second class humans, etc (despite all the rhetoric of religious groups, that they preached hate the sin and love the sinner, that is ultimately a crock, they preached basically hate for the most part towards gays and lesbians).
I also think a lot of people opposed to same sex marriage didn’t even think about it, they kind of absorbed it from the general environment, they might say things like it is a sin, etc, but in reality didn’t really care all that much.
What the hardcore opponents feared and have always feared is if you legalize same sex marriage that it will change people’s attitudes, that they probably suspected what I just wrote, that many people were ‘casually’ anti gay, anti same sex marriage, and would change if there was anything to make them think about it. My thoughts of this come from the Loving decision. Before that ruling, something like 80+ % of Americans thought interracial marriage was not a good thing; a year after the decision, 90% supported it.
So why? The answer is what has happened in many places in this country before today, that once same sex marriage was passed, most people yawned and said “what is the big deal?”. When Mass legalized same sex marriage (via the court), only about 35% supported it, yet opponents tried to overturn it, get the constitution amended, etc, and it failed. Why? Within a year, a majority of folks in mass supported it, and within a couple of years, it was some ridiculous majority, like 85%. New Hampshire passed same sex marriage, the conservatives and the conservative Christians tried to rally to get it overturned, and it failed, and these days a GOP senator said “we have same sex marriage, and the world hasn’t ended”.
Which raises a question, after so many years of same sex marriage, how come people were still crying doom and gloom? That it was going to ruin society, etc? I think the answer is more that the hard core people against same sex marriage for the most part are not against same sex marriage, they are against gays and lesbians, and what they fear is more that with same sex marriage legal, people will see gays and lesbians simply like they are, and that with gays and lesbians it will become much that has happened with being openly racist, being anti gay, homophobic, will become socially unacceptable and they fear that (yeah, I hear how this is ‘religious belief’, how that should be respected, but I would respond that is like beliefs that people shouldn’t have sex before marriage, live together without being married and so forth, the right to the belief is there, but you don’t have to respect someone showing contempt for other people or demeaning them or denigrating them either).
I think the rapid evolution on this in part backs this up, the attitudes towards gays pre the Mass decision and today has evolved rapidly, and in many places being openly anti gay will get you the same kind of ridicule you would get for being openly racist. I think with this decision, you will see the same thing in places today that are not very gay friendly, attitudes changing and so forth, because they will see gay couples getting married, they will see that God isn’t gonna throw lightening bolts or cause a nuclear war, and that their day to day life doesn’t change, and realize maybe what they were taught to believe was not true.
I’ve been reading some interesting articles on the practical issues arising from legalized gay marriage. Some employers who already offered benefits to domestic partners, may move to offer the benefits only to married partners.
At this point, I don’t think same-sex marriage changes laws/rules/offerings which apply to civil unions or domestic partnerships. Remember, there is some allowance for hetero domestic partners, as well.
Consistent with what I said yesterday about the work that still needs to be done:
I think you’re on to something. I live in Massachusetts and I remember all the predictions of doom and gloom. Gays would take over our schools. The clergy would be forced to marry same-sex couples. Incidences of abuse would skyrocket. Then none of that happened. About all I noticed were a few news stories featuring women in tuxes and hugging men. Life went on as usual. I think it convinced a lot of voters that it really wasn’t a big deal, and as people got to know married gay couples they began to see them as within the parameters of “normal” families.
Ironically I think deep down some people feel there’s something safer about a married couple than two unmarried people living together. Perhaps it’s the clear signal that these people have made a commitment to each other and have no interest in outside partners.