IGF CultureWatch

The epoch of the cultural wedge issue is ending, says Democratic political analyst Ruy Teixeira, in his new report, "The Coming End of the Culture Wars" (PDF). And gay marriage will soon lose its political potency. It's baked in the demographic cake.

That's because of generational change, as culturally progressive Millennial voters surge into the electorate. It's also, more immediately, because of the decline in the number of white working-class voters. And the fastest growing religious group is not evangelicals but seculars, who tend to be very culturally progressive.

Of course, this does not mean that conflicts over gay marriage will die out overnight. There will continue to be attempts on the state level to keep gay marriage illegal through the initiative process. Such initiatives have met with considerable success, including the recent passage of Proposition 8 in the progressive state of California. Yet a simple regression model developed by Nate Silver suggests that such initiatives have been losing support at the rate of roughly 2 percentage points a year. This time trend, combined with a couple of other variables on state religiosity, indicates that California would fail to support such an initiative by next year and only a handful of Deep South states should be expected to support gay marriage bans by 2016.

Fights will continue on the gay marriage issue, but the outcome of these struggles is not really in doubt looking 10 years or so down the road. And neither is the decreasing usefulness of this issue to the conservative culture warriors.