The Maine Vote: Why Gay Marriage Is a Generational Issue

Marriage-equality proponents are staring blankly into their coffee mugs today, wondering just what went wrong in Maine. It was supposed to be the place that proved the national tide is turning on gay rights. Yet voters endorsed a proposal to overturn an existing gay-marriage sanction. It's certainly a setback for the movement, but it's not the end. Not even close.

I tend to think of gay rights as a generational issue. Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight blogger who builds extraordinarily insightful electoral models, finds that support for banning gay marriage is eroding at a pace of 2 percentage points each year. Young people tend to be more supportive, and over time, I think that view will prevail. In years to come, opposition to gay rights will be as outdated a mindset as denying women the vote seems today.  The train is moving in one direction, and, like many movements before it, young people are driving.

There are lots of reasons young people are less bothered by gay rights than older folks. Young people are more comfortable coming out than ever (although I imagine it's still no easy feat). More and more young people know someone who is openly gay, and research conducted by Gallup indicates that people are more likely to support gay rights, like marriage, if they personally know someone who is gay. A Hattaway Communications/Lake Research Partners poll conducted earlier this year in Massachusetts also found that opposition to gay marriage had diminished significantly since that state first legalized it more than five years ago. As Massachusetts residents grew accustomed to having gay married couples in their state, the poll found that they even began to associate marriage equality with promoting family values.

Another, albeit less concrete, indicator of shifting political terrain is the contemporary abundance of positive representations of gays in popular culture, usually in TV shows that skew toward a younger demographic. I remember when Matt, the gay character on seemed groundbreaking. Nowadays it's entirely commonplace to have a permanent gay character. Think even as far back as and All these shows appeal to younger audiences, and none has suffered serious backlash from the presence of gay characters. Certainly this isn't a scientific measure, but cultural representations, particularly those embraced by youth, often presage broader social change.   

The Maine vote is truly disappointing for gay-rights activists, the fate of the minority again being decided by an unsympathetic majority. But it should be considered in context. It was an off-cycle vote, and such elections always have lower turnout than presidentials. Off-cycle demographics also tend to skew older, into demographics far less supportive of gay rights. There was also the odd wording of the ballot itself, which required proponents of gay marriage to vote no.

In many civil-rights movements, change can be slow, incremental, and suffer setbacks before making progress. As the movement gains traction, resisters dig in, the prospect of change prompting them to hold more fiercely to their position. It's a classic dance—two steps forward, one back. Maine is one step back, for sure, but I believe time will show we witnessed the real long-term trend in Washington state.