Libertarian Richard Posner tries to explain the sea change in gay rights between his youth and today. One huge factor I think he misses – and that will perhaps one day be given the attention it deserves – is the AIDS epidemic. When a country loses 300,000 young people to a single disease in a decade, and when those hundreds of thousands were effectively outed as gay, the collective consciousness shifts. People discover gay people in their own families and among their friends and co-workers and their perspectives can shift very suddenly. That's why polling on abortion remains relatively stable, while polling on gay rights has seen an accelerating transformation:
Although I knew in the 1950s that there were homosexuals, if asked I would have truthfully said that as far as I knew I had never met one, or expected ever to meet one, any more than I had ever met or expected to meet an Eskimo.
For today's teenagers, it's a different world entirely. And Posner sees where this debate has now led us:
It seems that the only remaining basis for opposition to homosexual marriage, or to legal equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals in general, is religious. Many devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims are strongly opposed to homosexual marriage, and to homosexuality more generally. Why they are is unclear. If as appears homosexuality is innate, and therefore natural (and indeed there is homosexuality among animals), and if homosexuals are not an antisocial segment of the population, why should they be thought to be offending against God’s will? Stated differently, why has sex come to play such a large role in the Abrahamic religions? I do not know the answer. But whatever the answer, the United States is not a theocracy and should hesitate to enact laws that serve religious rather than pragmatic secular aims, such as material welfare and national security.
"Why has sex come to play such a large role in the Abrahamic religions?" That is the question.
The Dish 