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well, this isn't really a matter of popular opinion in general...like any vote, it's a matter of which political machine was able to use the question of gay marriage to mobilize more people from within its base. the idea that in american pseudo-democracy any particular vote represents "the will of the people" seems goofy to me as a simple function of the number of abstentions. the illusion that things are otherwise follows from the fact that when an election result is tabulated, the total number of votes cast is taken as 100%. from there it kinda follows, this theater, that the percentage of that 100 represents the whole of the population. but it doesn't. it never has. think the first reagan "landslide" electrion that was based on 27% of the registered voters.
there's alot of problems that slide around beneath this surface charade of continual legitimation of the existing order by substituting the total number of people who vote in a particular election for the population as a whole. for example, it gives the impression that somehow or another the american system remains a healthy democracy. which it isn't---think about the quality of information that's generally available. without good information, there can't be rational deliberation. without deliberation, there's no democratic process. this isn't to say the opposite, that therefore there's no democracy--it's just a strange, rickety affair. so any knee-jerk populism seems to me simply naive.
in this particular matter....and this will kinda go against the above, but no matter (it's possible even ordinary to hold multiple viewpoints about the same situation)...what seems to me at issue here is probably self-evident, but to say it anyway: a complicated political and cultural conflict over questions of sexual orientation has condensed around the question of which groups get to control the definition of marriage. words do not remain stable in their meanings (150 years ago, a gig was a two-wheeled wagon that kids for example would cavort about in. now it's a term for a job that a musician might get. for example) one of the few aspects of the american system i think a well-engineered thing is the precedent system and its institutional infrastructure because it allows for adaptations. i think we're in the middle of a process of adaptation of shifts in understanding that center on matters of sexual orientation as a generally public matter. (i say this because it's self-evident that homosexuality is not an invention of the northern hemisphere since, say, stonewall).
what's at issue in this particular fight as it will play out across the court system is basically the same as was at issue in the referendum that passed prop 8---which groups have mobilized better, which have had more power and have been able to effect that power through placement of individuals on the supreme court (say) and the extent to which these broader cultural conflicts percolate into the court, what the arguments are, etc.
it's certainly not the last word on this question, whatever the ruling is.
personally i see no reason at all why people who happen to be gay should not be able to avail themselves marriage.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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