Okay, the title of this post is deliberately provocative. But, the third big suggestion I have for repeal of Prop. 8 is patience. No less a SSM advocate than Andrew Sullivan joins me in this counsel. And that’s because he sees, as clearly as I do, that demographic creep makes Prop. 8 only a temporary setback along the path towards realizing SSM.
The reason patience is a good strategy is quite simple. The younger you are, the less likely you are to see a problem with same-sex marriage. The exit polling for Prop. 8, looking at the age cleavages, reveals this to be nearly arithmetically true:
| Age Bracket | Percent Voting Yes |
Percent of Total Voters |
|---|---|---|
| 18-24 | 36% | 11% |
| 25-29 | 41% | 9% |
| 30-39 | 52% | 17% |
| 40-49 | 59% | 22% |
| 50-64 | 51% | 26% |
| 65+ | 61% | 15% |
The deviation in the trend is baby boomers, who were only barely in favor of Prop. 8. Right now, majority-“no” voters represent only one-fifth of the electorate. But as the seniors start dying out, and the Boomers neutralize, or at least nearly neutralize, the highest-propensity brackets to a break-even point, more young voters will fill move in to the youngest brackets, and the same people who right now are under 30 will move into higher-propensity voting brackets.
The result — if we assume that people who right now are ages eight to seventeen will vote on this issue in similar numbers as the brand-new voters of this cycle, in about ten years, those voters currently in the the 61% “yes” bracket will have both shrunk in size because of deaths within their ranks, and young voters replacing them in the generational cycle will vote with nearly the opposite pattern. Within ten years, given these trends, there will be a solid majority in favor of SSM out there in the electorate.
Ten years may seem like a long time for people who very much want to be married, and deserve to be married, to wait. And I don’t have a very palatable answer to that objection if you are making it. You deserve to be married now. But I’m not dealing with the normative world of “should” here, I’m dealing with the objective world of “the way it really is.” They way it really is, we have to wait until the demographics of the electorate become more friendly. Maybe the tipping point will pass in five years, but the longer we wait to try and get this done, the greater our chances of success.
