not waiting for the die-off

[rm]

The other day Frank Rich wrote a welcome op-ed in the New York Times that looked at how the resistance to marriage equality is both ludicrous and not likely to be significant enough to continue to control U.S. laws in another decade or so.

This piece, like many other essays, speeches, LJ posts and the like references the idea that younger people support marriage equality and, well, older people who don't will die off soon. Generational chance. Patience and we win.

I hate it. And not out of some spiritual enlightenment that thinks "waiting for the die-off" is both creepy and perhaps even morally suspect, although, I could certainly make those arguments with sincerity.

I'm also not pissed off about being asked to have patience. I don't have it, but I don't have it when I cook dinner either, so it's really neither here nor there.

No, I'm pissed off that minds will not be changed. That marriage equality will not be achieved through people admitting they were wrong, but through people just ceasing to be.

Yes, it's with a petty sense of vengeance that I loathe the die-off theory. I want bigots to change their minds. I want them to be ashamed.

It's pointless. And it's vicious.

But can you blame me, for also wanting to be vindicated?

But really, I should get over it.

And people should stop being creepy and talking about the damn die-off theory. It's not giving anyone the moral high ground.

Comments

[contrarywise]

I think the "die-off" effect is too small to account for what we've seen in MA since we gained equal marriage rights here. And I agree, it comes across as petty, small-minded and regressive to wait for our conservative opponents to kick the bucket and be replaced by young, liberal voters. But certainly, as time goes on, the tide of public opinion is shifting towards support for legalizing same-sex marriage throughout the country. I think that's due to a combination of trends: yes, the profile of the voting population is changing over time. But there's a stronger influence on support for same-sex marriage: the more people see that the apocalypse has not been triggered by hundreds of same-sex couples legally marrying each other, the less of a scaryscary bugbear the whole issue becomes. It's as much a matter of normalizing same-sex marriage as anything. I think it's not the radicals on the far ends of the political spectrum who decide such issues, it's the large mass of people in the middle who are becoming more comfortable with and accepting of same-sex marriage as time goes on. It also helps that the vanguard of the anti-marriage equality movement appear to be a bunch of paranoid whackjobs who tend to choose really bad arguments that are easily rebutted via publicly-accessible records and news accounts.