As if this week weren't politically fraught enough already, the Supreme Court now will have to rule on marriage equality. A federal appeals court has finally gone the other way and pronounced same-sex marriage bans constitutional in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.
Which leaves Anthony Kennedy, Steven Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the batters on deck — waiting, we hope, to knock the marriage question out of the park for good and all.
Wanna hear a coincidence? It crossed our minds yesterday that the 2014 midterms might have been a partial scream of frustration from old white guys about gays getting hitched. After all, it was the first nationwide election in which anybody could express an opinion, if they had one, on the tremendous progress the country has made since Windsor. So maybe all those teabags out there were hating on Adam and Steve at the same time that they were hating on Obama.
This is making more and more sense, especially since the demographics of Tuesday's voters have come out: They were more white and more male than in 2012, with fewer young people, and smaller percentages of blacks and Hispanics. Blowback on gay rights from an electorate like that certainly could have made a difference in states like Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Georgia and Kansas.
Oh, well. For us cats, the expansion of marriage equality has been the feel-good story of the year, and we wouldn't trade that for anything. We look forward to our gay loved ones' rights soon being settled law, for now and forever. It would make us PURR.
(IMAGE: The New Yorker)
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