Gay Marriage: Not Inevitable

from Stand Firm by Sarah

Good analysis from NRO again on the purported “inevitability” charade:

The president’s willingness finally to say what he believes increased the sense among gay-marriage supporters that final victory is inevitable. History with a capital “H” is on their side. The 21st century itself is practically synonymous with gay marriage. Although this smug confidence will envelop President Obama as he campaigns in such lucrative precincts as George Clooney’s living room, it badly overstates gay marriage’s prospects.

History is littered with the wreckage of causes pronounced inevitable by all right-thinking people. The failed Equal Rights Amendment looked inevitable when it passed Congress in 1972 and immediately 30 states ratified it. Opposition to abortion that was supposed to inevitably wither away is as robust as ever. The forces favoring gun control seemed unstoppably on the march when Congress passed the Brady Bill and the assault-weapons ban in the 1990s, but there are more protections for gun rights now than two decades ago.

Gay marriage’s inevitability hasn’t been evident to the voters in 31 states who have written into their constitutions that marriage is between a man and a woman. The latest is North Carolina, where 61 percent of voters embraced the traditional definition of marriage in a referendum. North Carolina isn’t Mississippi. President Obama won North Carolina in 2008, and Democrats are holding their convention there. Nation-wide, no referendum simply upholding traditional marriage has ever lost, and even in Maine, voters in 2009 reversed a gay-marriage law passed by the legislature.