The same sex marriage battle in a nutshell:
Political Front: 30 states now passed a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. Everywhere the issue won, even in liberal states, even during liberal surges everywhere else. The federal courts are sufficiently conservative to insure that same sex marriage will not be legislated from a federal bench in the near future.
Cultural Front: Homosexuals have won wide acceptance in society. Everyone knows a gay celebrity. Gay themed shows and movies are watched by millions. Thousands of companies offer benefits to same sex couples. Politicians march in gay pride parades. The nations youth is very accepting of homosexuality, and all demographics are showing a move towards acceptance of same sex relationships.
Prognosis: Culture directs politics. Slowly but surely homosexuals will gain wider and wider acceptance until they begin making political progress. Only a major religious revival or some other enormous cultural shift could halt the process.
Gays turned entertainment into a "gay-friendly" closed shop by cabalistic influence and control (example: Bob Geffen) and distributed gay propaganda to the nation for 30+ years through Hollywood and, more importantly, the Big Three television networks.
With wider choice, heterosexuals don't have to sit still for gay content and propaganda. With the loss of their infotainment oligopoly, homosexuals lose a captive vehicle of cultural influence.
Real choice and real competition in entertainment and information markets will force homosexual propagandists to compete with reality for mindshare. They'll lose, just like Communists lost in eastern Europe, because at the end of the day, their message is counterfactual, countercultural, counterproductive, and contra naturam.
Yes, the culture has moved very much in the direction of acceptance of homosexuality.
Whether that translates into future acceptance of same-sex marriage is uncertain, but “gays” are not being forced back into the closet.
Living conditions are better for homosexuals in the year 2008 than they have ever been before in our history. Why then, is the homosexual community so angry at not having the right to call their relationships marriage? That’s what’s really at stake. In California, the domestic partner law gives same-sex couples virtually all rights of marriage, without the title. Everyday life for gay Californians did not change with the passage of Prop. 8. Prop 8 defined marriage and nothing else.
40 states don’t have any legal recognition of gay relationships at all. Realistically, they should work on some of those states, rather than have hissy fits about an alleged roll back of their rights in a liberal state where their relationships are fully recognized, but denied the label of marriage.
I might add that the federal gov’t doesn’t recognize gay marriage either. Where are the federal court lawsuits? Ellen De Generes and Mr. Sulu are still single under federal law, and would still be single under federal law even if Prop. 8 had failed.