Bay Windows - April 1, 2004
Mubarak Dahir

But bless their right-wing hearts, that's exactly what they did.

Even they admit it.

"There's been an enormous increase in tolerance - that's the bottom line," Karyln Bowman told the Los Angeles Times, which in turn did its own digging into the reasons behind the dramatic shift in attitudes. Bowman compiled the poll findings for the institute.

According to their findings, a majority of Americans have consistently opposed same-sex marriage over the past three decades. No doubt, this is what the institute wanted to emphasize and highlight.

It may be true that the overall majority of Americans today oppose same-sex marriage. Certainly that was true 30 years ago.

But if you look at the full picture of what opinion polls tell you about Americans' attitudes towards gays and lesbians over the past 30 years, the picture isn't gloomy or anti-gay at all. In fact, perhaps to the dismay of the conservatives who gathered the data, what is seen is a remarkable shift of tolerance, even widespread acceptance, from the majority of the population.

Furthermore, this change in attitude happened at what is historically break-neck speed, when contrasted to other civil rights movements like those of blacks and women, who had to fight much longer to change the public's mind.

Even better is the news that suggests there is every reason to believe those attitudes will continue to sway towards tolerance and acceptance, and away from prejudice.

Inadvertently, the American Enterprise Institute has given us reason to celebrate. And they've uncovered cause for us to be hopeful for continued improvement in Americans' attitudes towards gays and lesbians in the future - including on gay and lesbian marriage, the issue that spawned the historical survey of opinion polls.

Indeed, if you look at the data compiled by the group, there's only one conclusion you can make: Within another generation, or maybe even less, same-sex marriage will be a hum-drum issue that most Americans accept matter-of-factly.

In releasing its data - notably that Americans have consistently opposed same-sex marriage over a 30-year span - the American Enterprise Institute was probably hoping to paint a gloomy picture for the future of same-sex marriage. Just the opposite is true, however.

What has emerged from the numbers is great reason for optimism, including on gay and lesbian marriage.

Here's why: The biggest gap in attitudes on same-sex marriage does not exist between men and women, or Democrats and Republicans, or whites and blacks, or Catholics and Protestants, or white collar and blue collar workers, or city dwellers and rural residents.

By far the biggest gap is the generation gap: Older Americans and younger Americans have startlingly different views on gays and lesbians in general, and same-sex marriage in particular. Luckily for us, younger Americans view gay and lesbian rights much more sympathetically, much mores a matter of inevitability, than do their parents and grandparents.

This schism is particularly dramatic on that hot-button issue of gay weddings. One national survey done in 2001 asked 1000 high school seniors their opinions about legalizing same-sex marriage. Of that group, 66 percent favored giving gays and lesbians the legal right to marry.

That number is astounding because it is more than double the amount that the same poll found among older Americans. It suggests that by the time today's kids become parents themselves - and leaders of American society, and arbiters of common social attitudes - the iron-hot issue of same-sex marriages will have lost its zing.

In covering the compilation of poll findings, the Los Angeles Times surveyed a number of historians and social scientists to try to find out just why and how this transformation of attitudes towards gays morphed so quickly.

The numerous reasons they came up with are not surprising, nor are they news to any of us who are gay and lesbian.

The factors that influenced America's lightning-rod alteration of attitudes towards gays and lesbians include the history of previous civil rights movements, which acclimated Americans to the struggles of marginalized groups; the sexual revolution of the 1960s; psychological research which showed that being gay or lesbian is not a mental illness; the AIDS epidemic, which marshaled gay men like nothing before, and forced many Americans to face that their own sons were gay; the recognition by the private sector that being bigoted was bad business, and thus the widespread adoption of anti-discrimination policies in the workplace; and the eventual political acceptance of gays through anti-discrimination laws.

But the single most important factor in changing Americans' attitudes has been the one-on-one coming out of individual gay and lesbian people to those they love and work with. It's much harder to hold onto a cardboard stereotype when you keep coming up against the much more complex reality of a person you know and love.

And the power of that truth won't change, even when the focus of our civil rights battle alters course from same-sex marriage and moves onto some other issue.

It's an important lesson that will never be out of date, whether we're talking about 30 years ago, or 30 years from now.

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