On Friday, Sociological Images had one of those too-cute-by-half academic debates about whether or not you can actually say that gay marriage opponents are “on the wrong side of history”. History, after all, covers a lot of ground, and things that are morally acceptable in one era are repugnant in another. To take an extreme but pertinent example, the Father of History, Herodotus, wrote at a time when sexual mores were utterly unlike those of today. They didn’t have gay marriage, but they also didn’t have our taboos against same sex intercourse.
Moving back to modern times, Sociological Images points out that in America each successive 20th century generation has had higher levels of support for gay marriage than the one that preceded it. On top of that, attitudes are also improving within generational cohorts, so plenty of Baby Boomers who were opposed to it fifteen years ago are now in favor.
The usual explanation for that change is some combination of familiarity and the increasing visibility of gay and lesbian Americans in modern life. In 2011, the overwhelming majority of Americans have lived their entire lives in the post-Stonewall world. Even people who view homosexuality as a grievous sin to be prayed away (or a perpetual temptation to be always resisted) are at least aware of the countervailing – and vastly more humane – idea that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Doubtless there is a lot of truth to those theories, but considering the amazing rapidity with which gay rights has moved through America, something deeper must be at work underneath those generational numbers. Recall that the fights for gender and racial equality began back in the 19th century and are hardly complete. Despite exposure to the same kind of generational turnover often cited as a reason for the progress of gay rights, women’s and minority rights have, over their nearly two centuries of American expression, seen progress repeatedly slow to a crawl or even reverse. By contrast, gay rights have moved steadily forward and covered an enormous amount of ground in just four decades of open advocacy.
There are a lot of factors at play in that difference, of course, and many of them aren’t easily measurable. But a good place to start may be in the wracking traumas of the mid-20th century and how they affected the United States. Prior to the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was tolerated in polite American society, after the war it wasn’t. Closer to home, the Civil Rights Movement enshrined the idea that the color of one’s skin should not determine the outcome of one’s life. Along similar lines, the emergence of take no prisoners feminism gave the idea of equality between the sexes real standing against the prevailing assumption of rigid and wildly imbalanced gender roles. None of those events eliminated the previous discriminatory culture, but they all operated on the same principle: that an individual should not be prejudged (hence “prejudice”) on factors beyond their control, like what color they are, what religion their parents practiced, or what’s between their legs.
The shared assumption against that kind of prejudice isn’t a new idea; even a glancing familiarity with the abolitionist movement will prove that. But what was new about its incarnation in the mid-20th century and after is that, through tremendous struggle and loss, it stopped being one of a number of competing ideas and became the default assumption. Of all the cultural gains of the last half century or so, that may prove to be the most important because it’s an argument ender.
You can see this powerful new framework in action any time someone defends a statement or an idea by saying that it’s not racist or not sexist. The morality changed such that people arguing against specific policies or actions now have to at least pretend that they aren’t basing their conclusions on antiquated and prejudicial notions. That is a genuinely new development, one that never happened in the 19th century. It’s also a main driver of the generational shifts about gay marriage and the reason gay rights has advanced so quickly compared to its predecessors.
The idea that prejudice based on something innate in a person is inherently wrong was already on its way to being the default when Stonewall happened. The gay rights movement has been able to use that to achieve in a few decades what other civil rights movements took more than a century to accomplish. The progress of a concept like gay marriage from a right wing cudgel in 2004 to majority acceptance in less than a decade has to be some kind of civil rights speed record.
Whether or not that idea has been enshrined for all history is irrelevant. Even a measly hundred years from now people will have different conceptions of right and wrong than we have today. But in contemporary America, at least outside of the right wing echo chamber, overt homophobia has taken its rightful place next to overt racism and overt sexism as a near total taboo. Until and unless something (which would almost certainly need to be a massively traumatic event) reverses the default assumption against prejudice, it will stay that way. That’s the right side of history.
