On Landslides

If you’ve been paying any attention to my dull life, you’ll know that I live on an island. Not just any island, mind you, but Washington’s own Whidbey Island, the second longest island in America. Besides being proximate to Seattle, Whidbey Island is known for its occasional landslides. Landslides?

Yep, landslides. That happened on Wednesday, and you can read about it here (with more pictures):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300117/Whidbey-Island-landslide-Thirty-homes-threatened-swathe-coastline-falls-sea-massive-landslide-Washington-island.html

But this post isn’t about landslides, but rather about the rise and rise of gay marriage. What was once an unheard of policy has become, in the span of about ten years, one of the most popular and pushed for social changes. The previous consensus define marriage as between a man and a woman has collapsed, not too unlike the land underneath these property owners’ homes.

At this point, you’re probably well versed in the talking points of the pro and anti gay marriage sides. I’m not interested in rehashing that debate. In fact, this post contains no such statement on the merits or demerits gay marriage itself. Instead, I find far more fascinating and far less discussed the speed by which this cause, once espoused only at the fringes, has become mainstream opinion. Why is gay marriage such a strong and fiercely debated issue, and how did it find widespread acceptance? I’ll give an answer to both of those questions in what follows. Stick around.

Cultural Anarchy

In the gay marriage debate, proponents of same sex marriage insinuate that it is religious people imposing their definition of marriage on the rest of the population. This verb, "imposing," is very interesting, because it implies that gay marriage is the status quo, and traditional marriage is an aberration, or reactionary action against it. In other words, gay marriage existed, and religious people are now trying to implement their more limited version of marriage in opposition to it.

This cannot be, because it clashes with both facts and recent history. Traditional marriage was the norm, gay marriage is the radical change. I think people that push for gay marriage know this, but heir language contradicts this observation. Rhetorically, it’s smart to portray the debate this way, because it puts on the defensive the traditional marriage crowd. Gay marriage is presumed to be the default option, and traditional marriage being a new plan, but only in the rhetorical sense, must justify its position, not the other way around.

Why then did the previous consensus on what defines marriage fall apart? What was it that caused a separate definition to emerge, and so suddenly? I’ll get to the second part, on the speed of the change, later, but let’s stay focused on the first part.

Allow me to present the idea that at the heart of the gay marriage debate is a struggle between competing cultures for control of the American public sphere. Their rhetoric is different, and their adherents may not even be aware of this fact, but these various cultures are fighting a war of language as much as they are fighting a war of policy. The prize in this battle is control of mainstream opinion, and the resulting defining of their particular preferences as normal and accepted.

Let’s rewind the tape two hundred years (do people under the age of twenty even get that idiom?). The United States was founded as a religiously pluralistic nation. Although primarily a protestant country throughout most of its history, it tolerated different sects and religions. The Russian Jew as well as the Irish Catholic fled to our shores, and they each became part of our shared culture. Though they were ethnically and culturally different, I’d argue that they shared more in common than in differences. Up until, let’s say the 1960s, this situation defined the US. We had a dominant protestant culture, with Catholics, Protestant blacks (unique for a variety of historical reasons), and Jews forming the primary minority groups.

Let’s look at the fancy ven diagram that I hastily, yet beautifully, whipped up in power point. Each circle represents the preferences, opinions, laws, traditions, and social mores associated with a particular culture/religion. A note before I proceed. I keep using culture and religion as synonyms for each other. Why? I’d argue that before the advent of mass media, particularly the television, your culture was primarily defined by your religion. Imagine yourself in a small town or an ethnic ghetto in a large city. Your world view, your morality, your preferences are largely defined by what religious group you happen to be born in. Regardless, the situation as it existed is presented here:

Imagine each circle is the worldview of a particular religious culture. A black Protestant, for example, has a collection of preferences, social mores, taboos, and a moral system unique and different from an Irish Catholic or a Norwegian Protestant. Alcohol, for example, was historically condemned as an evil by Protestants while being a central part of certain Catholic cultures. If we look at this chart, we can see that although there are differences, the cultural overlap is strong. A former slave and a recent Italian immigrant both knew the stories of Moses, Noah, and Abraham. Prior to the advent of the 1960s, the culture of the United States, far from being homogeneous, was composed of a variety of cultures with a high degree of overlap. The political battles of this time reflect this fact. The main battles of this era were economic in nature. Several presidential campaigns were fought over the gold standard and the climax of the era was FDR’s New Deal programs, which sought to benefit the poor and middle classes at the expense of the rich. It was an era of class warfare, not social issues. The social issues that were important, such as the prohibition on alcohol, were reflective of the cultural rupture between Protestants and Catholics.

But it all changed. Modernity, and how the various religions responded to it, caused a proliferation of new cultures and the dissolution of the consensus that did exist. Let’s return to our circles.

The areas of cultural cohesion have lessened. The cultural cleaves have multiplied. For the first time, we have the widespread emergence of a secular culture that forms its morality from non-religious sources. Increasingly, the media, Hollywood, and the political realm become the determinants of value systems. Many people are still religious, but the church has fallen to one factor among many that define the identity of a person. Additionally, we have the introduction of entirely new cultures/religions with the expansion of the immigration system in the 1960s.

The consensus that existed has died out. The common ground in American culture life is becoming shallower. As a result, we not only have increasing political polarization but an increasing prominence of social issues. As our shared definitions become no longer shared, a struggle develops over who controls those definitions.

Gay marriage is just another front in this ongoing war. I think this explains why its developed into an issue, but it doesn’t explain its victory.

Class matters

During this period, class has not gone away. Not only has it not gone away, I think it plays a crucial role in the rise of gay marriage.

The upper middle class possesses the power to enact social change, but this can only be done with the consent and popular support from the broader and larger middle class. Areas in which the interests and views of both the middle class and upper middle class align are areas in which we are more likely to witness reform.

Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) remains politically unpopular because it benefits the lower class at the expense of the middle class. Welfare too for similar reasons. Social Security and Medicare, both giveaways from the state, have continued political support and remain impervious to reform because they benefit, and thus get supported by, the middle class.

Gay marriage is successful because it was an issue that affected the cosmopolitan upper middle class and middle America. Gay people are not confined to a social class but exist across all incomes and races. The tony New York liberal has many gay friends. What changed was the fact that increasingly so too did Sally from Peoria. When out gay people were confined to San Francisco and New York, their cause was not popularly championed. As soon as they started coming out in the small towns and suburbs across America, millions of Americans soon came to know a neighbor or family member that was a homosexual. As determined by Gallup (and confirmed in other polls that I am too lazy to link to) knowing someone who is a homosexual is the primary determinant of whether someone is for or against gay marriage.

The overlap between the middle class and the upper middle class on this issue is the single largest factor pushing forward its rapid advance from popular opinion into policy. There are lots of issues that are popular, but fail to find political success. Gay marriage is not only popular, it’s popular among the right people. That’s why it’s winning.