Same-Sex Marriage Is Not The New Abortion

Jennifer Vasco writes in the Dallas Voice:

Gay marriage is not like abortion. This might seem obvious: One is about keeping a life from starting, the other is about joining two lives together. But in fact, gay marriage is compared to abortion a lot.



People lump gay marriage in the same polarizing issue category as abortion and gun control all the time. It’s one of the issues, it seems, that defines someone as a liberal or conservative, from a red state or a blue one. For example, the Washington Post said in a headline in 2004 that gay marriage is “the new abortion.”


And often, legal experts or other talking heads will predict the outcome of a Supreme Court gay marriage battle by looking at Roe v. Wade.


That decision was a disaster, they say, because the court’s opinion protecting the right to an abortion was far ahead of public opinion. The country was heading toward making abortion legal anyway, the theory goes, until the court made a big deal about it and caused a backlash that we’re still suffering from.


But gay marriage is not abortion.


In a New Yorker article on the Proposition 8 trial Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which is currently being argued, Margaret Talbot writes that researchers who “have studied public opinion on gay rights, believe that in five years a majority of Americans will favor same-sex marriage — the result of generational replacement and what [one researcher] calls ‘attitude adjustment.
 
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