Social conservatives hit the trifecta on Nov. 2, winning the White House and gaining seats in both the House and the Senate. Moreover, the election has been interpreted widely as a referendum for "morality" and against gay marriage. What do we do now?
First, don't panic. The evidence for an anti-gay religious landslide in the 2004 election is actually quite slim. Yes, 22 percent of voters rated "moral values" as the top issue. But 78 percent did not. And Kerry voters comprised almost one-fifth of that 22 percent, so the pro-Bush morality voters were about 17 percent of the total. Some minority of these people support gay equality or think of "moral values" as being mainly about abortion or a candidate's personal integrity. So probably no more than 15 percent of all voters were driven to the polls primarily by a hellfire-and-brimstone opposition to gays.
Second, panic a little. State constitutional amendments banning gay marriage passed easily in 11 states, with majorities ranging from 57 percent in Oregon to 86 percent in Mississippi.
More such state constitutional amendments will be proposed, and adopted, over the next few election cycles. We'll probably see about 30 states ban gay marriage by constitutional amendment when all is said and done.
Exit polls showed that 27 percent of voters favor gay marriage, while 35 percent favor "civil unions." This led some excited gay pundits to proclaim that a whopping 62 percent of the public favors gay marriage or its equivalent.
Don't believe it. Polls on gay marriage cannot be trusted. They systematically undercount opposition, often by 10 or more percentage points, as they did before the election.
As for civil unions, it's doubtful most people understand what the term means, much less understand it in the way gay activists do. Confronted with a polling question containing the actual definition ("Should homosexual couples receive all of the benefits and privileges of marriage, albeit under a different name?"), public support would drop. Informed specifically that gay couples in a civil union would have a right equal to married couples to adopt children, public support would likely fall to levels close to the support for gay marriage.
But there's a deeper reason to be concerned, deeper than particular fights over state amendments. We may be in the midst of a long-term religious revival, a periodic fact of life in this country's history. The revival has been most pronounced among Christian evangelicals who cleave to a literal - and anti-gay - interpretation of the Bible.
The Christian-conservative movement has organized itself politically with increasing vigor and effectiveness. It has now utterly captured the Republican Party, whose hard-right blueprint for victory has been vindicated. For as far as the eye can see the South and West are solidly Republican and religiously conservative. With the exception of Illinois, the Midwest is also trending Republican. By my count, 34 states are now either deep-red Republican or moving in that direction. In the next few election cycles, by fits and starts, we could see a Senate dominated by a party dominated by anti-gay religious conservatives.
This leads to my third suggestion. In the face of resurgent anti-gay religiosity, our best bet is to defend the principle of federalism. Federalism is the basic design of American government by which limited powers are allocated to the federal government to deal with defense, foreign relations, interstate commerce, certain fundamental rights, and a few other matters, while the states largely control everything else, including criminal law, property rights, and, most importantly for our purposes, family law.
Under our system, states are allowed to act as laboratories to experiment with social and economic reforms. Sometimes state reforms work and are then adopted nationally, as when a few states first gave women the right to vote. Sometimes they don't catch on, as when Nevada partially legalized prostitution.
Even many conservative Republicans who oppose particular reforms (like gay marriage) believe that states should be allowed to experiment with them. Federalism-based arguments are the only thing that saved us from a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage this past summer.
With federalism in place, we can use our support in Blue Nation - the relatively secular enclaves in the Northeast, West Coast, and Illinois - to push for positive change (domestic partnerships and civil unions where necessary, marriage where possible). As the results in state races in California, Massachusetts, and Vermont showed, these enclaves are solidifying for pro-gay secularism just as the rest of the country is solidifying for anti-gay religious conservatism. Experiments in recognizing gay relationships can proceed in this state-by-state way until the religious revival subsides, as historically these revivals always have, or the Republican coalition fissures.
In the meantime, this strategy means discouraging lawsuits that try to nationalize the gay-marriage issue. Litigation attempting to force Red Nation to accept gay marriage will only succeed in goading these states into anti-gay constitutional action, which would destroy federalism and any fledgling experiments along with it. We will have to do the hard and time-consuming work of persuading our fellow citizens in the states that they have nothing to fear from encouraging commitment among gay couples.
I still think we win in the long-term, including on marriage. But the election helped to clarify that the long-term is likely to be a very long time indeed. The federalism-based enclave strategy will not please revolutionaries, but it's right in principle, and it's probably the best we can do for now.