The Republican mayor of San Diego just reversed himself on marriage equality and agreed to sign a a City Council resolution supporting a challenge to California’s gay marriage ban (also opposed by the state legislature). Moving video moment here. He’d previously vowed to veto it. He has a lesbian daughter, it turns out, and like many other parents of gay children, simply didn’t believe it was a positive step to keep her segregated from her own family and community and stigmatized as inferior.
Click through to the video. It really is moving.
I think it is easy to oppose something like gay marriage in the political abstract, and I suspect that most opposers simply do oppose it in the political abstract. But as the San Diego mayor found it, when it affects your family and friends, there simply is no justification to keep a certain segment of society "separate but equal".