Scrub that fader, mutherfucker. it'll make ya feel good.
What makes me feel good is how sudden the shift was, and I can tell you exactly WHY that shift happened. Somewhere around the time I left California in 2003 Gay marriage was a joke to trigger a laugh track on a sitcom. Then, I started seeing stories everywhere. Gay couple together for 50 years can't say goodbye at a hospital. Gay couple have to spend $2500 on power of attorney that comes with a marriage certificate. Sally Ride's partner can't get access to her pension. Gay couple together 20 years has issues with childcare. Gay couple together 10 years.... 40 years... These articles started all the sudden, like they were part of a campaign. It started after Massachusetts legalized civil unions and spread from there, I think. Best I can find with my googling was this talk about changing the laws at the state and court level. There were commercials here in Kentucky in 2004 talking about why gays want to get married, and every commercial was a couple that had been together dozens of years. But as I have said before here an elsewhere, the gay marriage fight should get a huge slice of the credit for saving traditional marriages. Before this fight a marriage was a wedding and the bigger the better. Then the inevitable divorce when the bills all came do. Britney Spears was married 50 hours, yet a couple together 50 years were treated like shit by end of life caregivers in Georgia. That reality star had a $10 million wedding and divorced in less than four months, yet people committed to each other for decades can't get survivor benefits. Marriage is no longer as focused on the wedding and more on the benefits you get as far as next-of-kin, taxes, survivor benefits etc. gays made marriage more serious than it was in the 2000's. This is what won the war for gay marriage, and I really wish I knew if it was a concerted campaign or just something that dozens of people all had the same idea at once. Same thing now is going on with the stupid drug war. Some kid smoking dope after school has his life ground into shit while a guy who drives drunk is not treated nearly as bad. People are now seeing the stories of what the war on drugs is doing not just to the people who use drugs, but the people who live in the targeted communities. You said weed will be legal in five years, and I am all on board with that, if it takes that long with all the ballot initiatives in 2016. Same thing. It hits that certain level of "This is bullshit" in a population then you get that slider where we went from 2004's ballot initiatives to ten years later on the far right gives a damn. Moral arc of the universe, indeed.
I can point to exactly where it started. Here's the thing: Prior to 2004, gays just didn't get married. They didn't try to get married. Nobody was going to issue them a marriage license (although I attended a gay wedding in Santa Fe, NM in 1984, nobody expected it to be recognized by anyone). Then the mayor of San Francisco, in an obvious move to pander to his constituency and thumb his nose at the Republican Party, issued marriage licenses in direct opposition to the state legislature. Which gave Turdblossom'n'co the opportunity to get the bigots out to vote for Bush so that OH BOY we could put those liberals in their place! But then all these upright christians, who didn't actually care about it all that much, discovered that it wasn't hard to have a conversation with someone who at least had a gay relative and didn't see what all the fuss was about. And then all these laws got passed basically saying "fuck gay marriage" and emboldened by San Francisco, the gay rights crew set about making those upright christians, who didn't actually care about it all that much, embarrassed by their actions. Because really? I mean, Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter. It's not like middle America is devoid of homosexuals. And most people aren't motivated by hatred. So when it came down to it, they were willing to not hate. And here we are.