Wednesday, October 8, 2014

The High Water Mark


"No matther whether th’ constitution follows h’ flag or not, th’ Supreme Coort follows th’ election returns” Humorist Finley Peter Dunne, writing as his alter ego, Mr. Dooley, in 1901.


This post was supposed to go up yesterday.  But a clerical error at the Supreme Court threw things into chaos for about 24 hours.  But by the close of business today we had two big developments; marriage equality in Nevada and in West Virginia.

Meanwhile, the of Idaho charged forward with an almost certain to fail appeal of the recent decsioin by the ninth circuit.  The actions of the Governors of Idaho and Nevada are completely consistent with my basic premise: the march of marriage equality tracks with the will of the voters. West Virginia is a slightly more complex example. Although the President only got 36 percent of the vote in 2012, its governor is a Democrat and I think it's safe to say that opposition to gay marriage is now untenable in national Democratic party politics.

As of this writing, 27 states (and DC) with marriage equality and 24 states without.  All but three states that voted for Obama have marriage equality.  Michigan is the only state where the President got more than 51% of the vote that does not have marriage equality. Only four Romney states have marriage equality and one of them, Indiana, was carried by Barack Obama in 2008.

Today, I re-crunched the numbers I had prepared for this blog yesterday.  It would have been inaccurate and wrong to not give West Virginia it's due place in history.  Thankfully, West Virginia is a small state so it didn't move the numbers much.  So I crunched the numbers.  In the 27 jurisdictions with marriage equality, President Obama got 55.8% of the vote and Governor Romney got 42.3%. That's a 14 point blowout, with a margin of nearly 10 million votes. In the 23 states without marriage equality, the President got only 45.1% and Romney netted 53.4%.  That's an eight and a half nine point deficit for the President totaling over 5 million votes.

So the equality states are solidly Democratic and the other states are solidly Republican. This disparity will level off in the coming weeks.  Idaho's stay of the 9th Circuit's ruling could be lifted as soon as tomorrow.  Officials in Kansas and North Carolina have hinted that they might not pursue their appeal further.  In a matter of weeks, if not days, we'll have another handful of states with marriage equality.  I'll probably update the numbers once again when those results are in.  But my point has been made.  This movement has been driven by the people and their representatives and even the judges appointed to serve them are not immune to popular sentiment.  In this instance, that happens to be a mitzvah.








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