It seems hard to believe, but it was less than 20 years ago that Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, barring federal recognition for same-sex marriage couples.
It was less than a decade ago, for that matter, that Colorado voters approved a state constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a man and a woman.
President Obama himself, now an ardent supporter of same-sex marriage, didn’t formally announce that position until 2012.
Attitudes change, sometimes quickly and sometimes not. But in the case of same-sex marriage, the change has been at warp speed for a social issue involving such deeply entrenched tradition, as poll after poll reveals.
Gallup’s own surveys, for example, show support for same-sex marriage rising from 35 percent in 1999 to 60 percent last month.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s welcome decision Friday declaring that gay couples have the same right to marriage as other couples reflects that change, as well as relies upon it.
“The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, “but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest. With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.”
Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent, mocked Kennedy’s opinion for a “style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic.” And while some of Kennedy’s prose was indeed flowery, some of it was eloquent, too, and exactly to the point.
“If rights were defined by who exercised them in the past, then received practices could serve as their own continued justification and new groups could not invoke rights once denied,” he correctly noted. “This court has rejected that approach, both with respect to the right to marry and the rights of gays and lesbians.”
Same-sex couples should have the same right to make a personal choice regarding marriage as heterosexual couples — and now they do across the land.
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