Marital Differences

Will this year’s midterm elections feature a new raft of state ballot initiatives to ban same-sex marriage?

Definitely. Voters in eighteen states have already passed such bans, and the ballot initiatives have proven to be a major base-mobilizer for conservatives—so this year, there will be more. At least six states—Alabama, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin—will certainly hold referenda, and Arizona and Colorado are likely to do so as well. And given the success such measures have enjoyed at the ballot box, they will probably pass with strong majorities.

Yet these referenda—and the ongoing backlash they represent against the 2003 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to legalize same-sex marriage—do not constitute the most interesting development in the emerging politics of gay marriage.

What development would that be?

A quiet countercurrent, driven ...