GAY MARRIAGE, FROM PAGE 1:
Public opposiTion seems likely To fade over Time
under pressure from businesses, felt compelled to weaken socalled religious freedom bills. But they will not impede the ability of gay and lesbian couples to marry, Rosenberg said.
In North Carolina, the Senate president, Phil Berger, a Republican from Rockingham County, is the chief sponsor of a bill that would allow the county officials who issue marriage licenses as well as magistrates to decline to participate in marriages on religious grounds. The bill has passed the Senate.
It is strongly opposed by gay rights advocates who argue that “public officials can’t pick and choose,” in the words of Chris Sgro, the executive director of Equality North Carolina.
The strongest resistance so far to court-directed change has been in Alabama, where the state Supreme Court ruled that a federal judge’s decision striking down the gay marriage ban should apply only to the specific plaintiffs.
In legal limbo, the state is waiting to see how the Supreme Court will decide.
Yet whatever resistance strategies are adopted, many legal and political experts who have studied the impact of divisive Supreme Court rulings in the past, and the trajectory of the gay marriage movement, say they do not expect a lasting, powerful backlash of the kind that followed decisions on school desegregation and abortion.
Instead, the experience in states where same-sex marriage has already been legalized suggests that public opposition is likely to wither over time.
“As more couples marry, more people will know people who are married,” said Michael Klarman, a legal historian at the Harvard Law School and author of a 2012 book on earlier gay marriage rulings. “And those who oppose it will find out that the sky doesn’t fall.”
Without question, the legal turn has been abrupt. Since mid-2013, when the Supreme Court invalidated the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that forbade the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages, the number of states in which same-sex marriage is permitted jumped from around a dozen to 37, if Alabama is included, and the District of Columbia.
Most of these states were required to change by federal courts, often provoking the resentments expressed by Kallam, especially in rural regions. If the Supreme Court extends marriage rights, all remaining states will be forced to end restrictions.
As fast as the law has moved, public support for same-sex marriage has also accelerated in recent years, even in the lagging states, rising to 56 percent nationally in 2014, from 30 percent in 2004, according to the General Social Survey.
Also significant is the large gap in attitudes between young and old. In contrast to abortion, about which opinions have varied little for decades, “those who oppose gay marriage are slowly aging out of the electorate,” said Patrick Egan, a political scientist at New York University.
The earliest state court decisions favoring same-sex marriage — in Hawaii in 1993 and Massachusetts in 2003 — did provoke strong reactions, helping lead to the 1994 federal marriage law and a later profusion of restrictive state amendments.
The opponents registered an unbroken string of ballot victories right up to the one in North Carolina in May 2012. But later that year, the other side started to win elections.
“The winds have shifted dramatically and the first wave of backlash, which was overwhelming, will not be repeated,” said Jane Schacter, a professor of constitutional law at Stanford Law School.
In North Carolina, the divisions and shifts in attitudes were apparent in recent conversations in Greensboro and nearby Rockingham County, where the pale green of spring was streaked with dogwood blossoms and empty textile factories are a reminder of more prosperous days.
In Greensboro, a city of 280,000 and the seat of Guilford County, Jeff Thigpen is the elected register of deeds, whose office issues marriage licenses. He describes himself as a Christian “who began to see that my faith is not an impediment to loving my neighbor.”
One tangible change since October is on the office computer that couples use to fill out marriage license applications. Formerly, when the applicant typed in his or her gender, the screen’s background turned blue or pink. Now, it is a uniform gray-blue for all. By mid-April, the county had issued more than 300 same-sex licenses, Thigpen said.
Thirty-five miles north, in Eden, population 15,000, the Rev. Steve Griffith is the senior pastor of the church Kallam attends, the Osborne Baptist Church.
Located in a onetime headquarters of Fieldcrest Cannon, a defunct textile giant, the church attracts about 1,500 worshippers on Sunday.
Griffith, 52, who is apt to wear T-shirts and jeans even at services, firmly believes that homosexual behavior is a sin, but he senses the political trends.
“I fully expect that same-sex marriage will become the law of the land,” he said. But he does not intend to perform such marriages.
Still, many churchgoing residents here viewed the issue with a live-and-let-live shrug.
“I’m not in favor of gay marriage; it’s a sin, but there’s not much I can do about it,” said Sandra Vernon, 64, a retired office worker, as she left a coffee shop in nearby Reidsville.
The flux in opinions was expressed by Kristina Bailey, 27, who is studying for teaching credentials at Rockingham Community College. She is an active church member, and she voted in 2012 for the amendment to outlaw gay marriage.
But her views have softened, in part because of a chance encounter at a pet supply store. Now, she says, she has mixed emotions about the issue.
Her 5-year-old daughter had acquired a hermit crab at the beach, and they went to the store to buy a habitat for it. There they met and became friends with the saleswoman, who married her longtime female partner in October.
“I was happy for them at a personal level,” Bailey said.
“I don’t want to force my religious views on someone else,” she said. “If they can prevent people from marrying who they want, they can keep me from going to the church I want.”
The saleswoman, Ann Marie Jarvis, and her wife, Christy Michelle Finney, had been together for 17 years when marriage became possible last fall.
The couple have chosen to stay in Reidsville, where they have supportive relatives and a supportive pastor, Jarvis said in an email.
“People in this small community have been very welcoming,” she said.