
Friday marks 20 years since an activist court forced a redefinition of marriage on the people of Massachusetts.
After years of failed attempts to win over public opinion, the court in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health ruled on May 17, 2004 – nine years before Obergefell legalized same-sex “marriage” in every state – that it was unconstitutional to allow only heterosexual couples to marry.
‘Broadly Positive’
A new review from the Rand organization claims that gay “marriage” has had “broadly positive” effects on American society. History, the researchers argue, has proved gay “marriage” opponents wrong.
Molly Ball reported on Rand’s research in a piece for the Wall Street Journal.
The Rand report recounted that conservatives claimed granting “legal status to marriages between same-sex partners would alter the foundation of marriage and diminish its value for different-sex couples, ultimately harming children.”
In the wake of same-sex “marriage” becoming normalized, however, LGBT couples have enjoyed more stable relationships, slightly higher rates of home ownership, and a decline in “sexual-orientation-motivated hate crimes.” Those outcomes, the Rand report suggests, prove that conservatives had gay “marriage” wrong from the start.
The Rand report is right in one sense: in the early 2000’s, objections to same-sex marriage tended to focus on fears that the children of these couples would suffer poor outcomes. Advocates of same-sex marriage leaned into dry arguments about legal equality. Same-sex couples, the argument went, just wanted to be left alone to raise their kids and visit each other in the hospital.
But the metrics considered by Rand – how LGBT couples have benefited – don’t tell us the whole picture, and they certainly do not give a fair assessment of how gay “marriage” has played out for America. Less than 1% of U.S. adults are in same-sex “marriages,” after all, and less than 10% of LGBT Americans are even “married.”
The impact of Goodridge on America should not be assessed based on what homosexual activists hoped for or conservatives feared in 2004. What matters most, rather, is what actually followed the decision.
The “foundation of marriage,” contrary to Rand’s sunny report, has not only been damaged by gay “marriage” but aggressively warped into a gargoyle caricature of itself.
In the legal promotion and cultural acceptance of the new, loosely defined “marriage,” Americans have as a direct result suffered grave damage to their freedom of speech and the free exercise of their religious convictions.
As Matthew Schmitz observes, gay “marriage” has brought about a real transformation of American society: “Its recognition changed the makeup of the American elite by causing more conservative and religious actors to lose standing while left-wing activists gained power and prestige.”
The Rand researchers and far-leftists think that outcome is a good thing, of course. Same-sex “marriage” in Massachusetts was the first big cultural “win” for progressives in the Democratic Party, forcing leaders like Joe Biden and Barack Obama to “evolve” on the matter within just eight years.
Cancel Culture
Schmitz points out that gay “marriage” advocacy brought about a full embrace of Marxist, Gramschi-like tactics on the political left:
Gay marriage was the first great triumph of cancel culture. Sasha Issenberg, a historian of gay marriage, has observed that by deploying the novel weapons of “shaming and shunning,” activists “changed the economic terrain on which cultural conflict was waged.
The price of not conforming to the new leftist cause – “love is love” – could now mean losing everything. Remember Brendan Eich? The Mozilla CEO lost his job when he was “outed” for supporting California’s Proposition 8.
Lest we forget, the original “cancel culture” born of the gay “marriage” movement captured the elites long before people associated the Democratic Party with the far-left activism of more recent years. Wielding the cudgel of “marriage equality,” progressives won the institutions, and the American people gradually came around to the new (punitively enforced) point of view.
And gay “marriage” proponents brooked no opposition.
They first eliminated pro-marriage voices from America’s leading institutions. But they did not stop there. Next, they set their sights on working-class Americans – bakers, website designers, farmers, innkeepers, florists – who declined to celebrate or participate in mock-weddings.
‘Denying Human Rights’
Under today’s pro-gay-“marriage” norms, even churches and religiously-affiliated charities. By the time of CNN’s 2020 primary town hall event, candidate Beto O’Rourke could openly tell moderator Don Lemon that churches, colleges, and charities opposing same-sex “marriage” should lose their tax-exempt status:
There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break, for anyone or any institution, any organization in America, that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us.
Another step toward O’Rourke’s vision is the 2022 passage of the so-called Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA). Far beyond redefining marriage, the law established a private right of action – allowing individuals to bring a federal lawsuit against “state agents” who disregard out-of-state marriage licenses or “the rights or claims arising from them.” It also allows the U.S. Attorney General to bring civil action against dissenters.
The declaration of open lawfare on defenders of marriage gives a veneer of morality to what O’Rourke articulated: “Judeo-Christian values are bigoted and a threat to the LGBT identity,” goes the logic of the LGBT movement embraced by Rand. “Therefore, they forfeit their rights under the Constitution.”
The Court of Public Opinion
Pro-gay “marriage” activists in fact lamented that the RFMA didn’t go far enough because it didn’t require religious non-profits to provide services to gay couples.
The First Amendment be damned.
All of these efforts worked to transform America from a post-Christian liberal society that largely frowned on gay “marriage” (in 2004 about 60% of Americans disapproved) into a society in which “more than 70 percent of Americans now approve of marriage for same-sex couples.”
But the progressive push for gay “marriage” didn’t just take a win and get on with building strong gay “marriages” and raising kids in newly-legitimized gay households. The revolution they had in mind was never meant to end at the Supreme Court in Obergefell – it was intended to “queer” every social institution and sexual norm in sight.
The ‘T’
On top of all the above, the LGBT coalition has also leaned more and more into the “T.”
We are now at a point when men win national women’s championships and enjoy Title IX protections. Taxpayer dollars fund genital mutilation surgeries touted as “gender-affirming care,” and school boards mandate training for Kindergartners that promotes “medical transitions” and “disrupts” children’s thinking about sex. Men with gender dysphoria pay women to bear them trafficked children, and the elite ruling class celebrates it as “love.”
The transing of American youth makes for an astonishing case study in social contagion: twenty-eight percent of Generation Z identifies as LGTBQ, compared with only 16% of Millenials and 7% of Baby Boomers.
Gay “marriage” did not make America a safer place to be a child.
It was one more stop on the sexual revolution’s long conveyor-belt-ride to an America that now teaches its children that their own bodies can be “wrong,” that their religious parents are monstrous bigots, that their cultural heritage is utterly depraved, and that in a just society, dissenters against the new sexual orthodoxy are silenced under threat.
And we now see the same cancel culture tactics once employed in the same-sex “marriage” skirmish being wielded just as handily in the trans debates. Writers such as Abigail Shrier and J.K. Rowling come to mind.
A More Radicalized America
The legacy of same-sex “marriage” is not a more compassionate, tolerant society but a more dystopian, radicalized America. Far from signaling that our country is more unified by “love is love,” our society has grown less tolerant, more hostile, and almost hopelessly divided.
The Rand report’s blithe assurance that everything is fine ignores both the broader arc of the progressive triumph and the real, devastating impact of the sexual revolution on children, families, and society at large.
Twenty years ago, Massachusetts forced the deconstruction of marriage, sex, and gender on the American people.
Today, the kids are not okay.
