I love this graph from an article in today’s New York Times.  It shows what states did for and against the idea of same-sex marriage.

You can see that the anti-SSM movement got out ahead of the issue in the mid 1990s by enacting laws banning same-sex marriage.  I have no way of proving this, but I think that by making same-sex marriage an issue, it became, well, an issue.  And that motivated same-sex marriage proponents to organize and lobby and take the issue to the courts.  Once Massachusetts ruled that same-sex bans were unconstitutional in 2003, the floodgates opened.

I don’t think the floodgates opened because the notion of same-sex marriage became fashionable or popular.  I think they opened because once people started to examine and think about the issue, there was simply no constitutional (or even moral) reason for the government to discriminate against homosexual love.

But yeah.  If you had asked me in 1995 if there would be such a thing as legally-recognized gay marriage in this country, I think I would have answered “someday, but not in my lifetime.”  It is the great civil rights issue of my generation, and I really believe it will be over in June.