I Have Good News and Bad News

The good news? You can finally tell racist gays who blamed African Americans for Prop 8 to shut the f*** up, and legislators who vote for gay rights often keep their jobs.

The bad news? None of this seems to bring us closer to marriage equality.

As we scoured the internet (read: got random stuff forwarded to us) this week, the TNG team came across two marriage related analyses. One - covered by Ben this morning - suggested that race had a lot less to do with Prop 8 than previously reported, but that until old people die and churches start disappearing we'll never have equality. The second study we came across was from Freedom to Marry, a gay rights group, and sought to prove that legislators who back marriage equality (either through supporting pro-marriage bills or opposing anti-marriage bills) almost always win re-election. In other words, they are not brought down by this issue, even though legislators are often promised by anti-marriage politicians and lobbyists that their careers will be over if they stand up for gay rights. But the reality isn't so simple.

I tend to be skeptical of analyses from an obviously biased organization, especially when reading the report is confusing, few hard numbers are provided, and the way in which they are making their calculations seems to change at their convenience. This report certainly read a lot like that.

Even assuming that the integrity of the report is not a source of concern, what does this really tell us? For example, it discusses anti-marriage laws in several states that passed by wide margins. It's great that the 30% of legislators who voted for gay rights didn't lose their reelections, but what does that really matter if the bill passed? There will always be seats in every state - no exception - that are more liberal than others, and that are safe for people with liberal positions. By now, the gay rights movement has most of these seats, if for no other reason than the need of those politicians to have the support of the liberal base.

To me this is more discouraging than anything else, as it shows people who are actually in competitive seats aren't supporting marriage equality. If they were - unless they've just gotten very lucky in the past few years - more of them would be losing their seats. In states like Virginia and Tennessee, two mentioned in the study, there is a good reason why no one who supported marriage rights lost reelection: they are all from solid blue seats. No one in a district that could possibly swing for a conservative candidate is supporting equality, and that's why measures which legislated discrimination in these states passed by wide margins.

As the numbers out of California showed, we've got the base - liberals who don't spend every day at church, be they white or black, by and large support equality. It's getting past the base that's the problem, and this study affirms the depth of this challenge rather than providing some kind of security.

On a happier note, polling data this far out from an election? The political junkie in me - if not the fighter for marriage equality - feels suddenly fulfilled.