As something of a footnote to the above, the evidence that marriage justice and the whole idea of LGBT rights is gaining ground is found in more that just court decisions.One way to tell is by noting how ridiculous and desperate the arguments of antis are becoming. It's not just, as for example happened in the case of Idaho, that the antis are using arguments that have repeatedly failed, it's that the other arguments they try are getting just silly.
Here's an example: In February, a federal court ruled that Kentucky officials must recognize legally valid same-sex marriages performed in one of the states that allow them. That is, if a same-sex couple got married in say New York and then moved to Kentucky, they're not suddenly unmarried.
Last week, the state filed its appeal of that decision in which it argued that the ban on recognizing such marriages should be upheld because, quoting the appeal, the "laws are rationally related to the state's interest of preserving the traditional man-woman marriage model," because "man-man and woman-woman couples cannot procreate" and Kentucky has an interest in encouraging procreation in the name of promoting "long-term economic stability through stable birth rates."
In other words, same-sex marriages are bad for the state's business climate.
There's an obvious flaw in the argument, which is that this requirement for fertility is enforced in no other way. You don't have to prove both parties are fertile in order to get married; being past child-bearing years is no bar to marriage; if you decide you don't want children, your marriage is not annulled; there is no requirement of any sort anywhere in the state's laws. Which means, in strictly legal terms, the state has not demonstrated any such "interest" in "stable birth rates."
The other thing, and this is where the silly comes in, what is it that the government of the state of Kentucky imagines will happen if the ban on recognizing out-of-state same-sex marriages is maintained?
Do they think that all those gays and lesbians who suddenly find themselves not married to the person they love will go out and find someone of the opposite sex, get married, settle down, and start pumping out the demographically-appropriate number of babies? What is going through their minds? It's just silly.
Another way you can tell that things are changing for the better comes from the results of a survey from the Pew Research Center For The People & The Press which was published on May 19: The organization said it showed "immense changes in American attitudes towards the sexual orientation of their political leaders."
The question was about a candidate for president, assuming they were otherwise qualified. Those who said they would be less likely to support a candidate if they were gay or lesbian accounted for 27% of the total, while 5% said it would make them more likely to support that person - and most, a whopping 66%, said it wouldn’t matter one way or the other. As recently as 2007, nearly half, 46% said they would be less likely to vote for a gay or lesbian candidate, a 19 percentage point shift in seven years.
Even if that 66% is inflated, even if it includes people who are saying that only because they feel it's socially unacceptable to express prejudice toward gays and lesbians, that still means that it's becoming socially unacceptable to express prejudice toward gays and lesbians, which itself is evidence of progress.
Things are changing, justice is coming. There is no denying it. We may be losing in a lot of ways, but on this one, justice is winning.
Sources cited in links:
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/another-gay-marriage-ban-bites-the-dust
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/kentucky-interracial-marriage-same-sex-birth-rate-ban
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/13/1299063/-Kentucky-appeal-argues-same-sex-marriage-is-bad-because-the-profit-margins-aren-t-good-enough?detail=email
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/19/american-gay-president_n_5353206.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices
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