Options few for opponents of same-sex marriage

Proposals that let people ‘opt out’ could bring political heat

EDEN, N.C. — John Kallam Jr., 67, carries a worn black Bible and another copy on his iPad, and he believes Scripture is unequivocal.

“Sodom and Gomorrah, that story alone tells you what God thinks of samesex marriage,” he said. “God said that homosexual behavior is a sin and that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

Like three-quarters of the voters in rural Rockingham County, he checked “yes” in the 2012 plebiscite when North Carolina joined some 30 other states in adopting constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. “I breathed a sigh of relief,” he recalled. “I thought that was the end of it.”

But last October, Kallam, like many other conservatives across North Carolina, was stunned when, two years after “the people spoke,” as he put it, a federal judge overturned the ban.

An appointed county magistrate, Kallam was obligated to perform civil marriages whether they were same-sex or not. So he resigned, one of six in the state who stepped down to avoid violating their faith.

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on same-sex marriage Tuesday, the nation seems more ready to accept it than many imagined even a year ago. But divisions remain, and while more than half of Americans now endorse the idea, about one-third say they oppose it, according to survey data from 2014.

InNortheasternstatessuchasVermont and New York, large majorities support same-sex marriage. And in many more states, including California, where a vote in 2008 to ban it was later overturned by the courts, such marriages have become routine.

In perhaps a dozen other states, mainly in the South and the Great Plains, majorities still think gay and lesbian couples should not be allowed to marry, studies indicate. Some conservative leaders promise to keep defending that view whatever the Supreme Court decrees — and even if they have few practical options.

“If the government wants to pretend to redefine marriage, I don’t think that will settle the issue,” said Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition.

Still, once the Supreme Court speaks, in a decision widely expected to make same-sex marriage a national right, the opponents’ anger and energies are likely to focus on a more limited issue, what they call protections for conservative religious officials or vendors who want to avoid involvement in same-sex weddings.

Gerald Rosenberg, a political scientist and legal scholar at the University of Chicago, said his former predictions of a wider, lasting backlash to marriage rulings have been overtaken by the “sea change in public opinion.”

Such “opt out” proposals may produce political heat, as recently seen in Indiana and Arkansas, where the governors,