We’re going to win
by David Atkins
Remember back just a decade ago when this would have been unthinkable?
When, as most everyone expects, Gov. Neil Abercrombie signs into law same-sex marriage here in the coming days, it may almost seem like a routine event. Hawaii is poised to be among 16 states to approve gay marriage, along with Illinois and shortly after Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island.
But the step in Hawaii has special resonance because the contemporary battle over same-sex marriage was born here two decades ago. Such marriages existed nowhere when Ninia Baehr and Genora Dancel, along with two other couples, filed what seemed like an utterly quixotic lawsuit seeking a marriage license. To near universal shock, Hawaii’s Supreme Court granted them a victory in 1993, ruling that a refusal to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry was discriminatory and illegal.
It was the first judicial expression of an idea that soon caught fire across the country and the world.
Things can often seem hopeless. For years and even decades it can seem as if opposition to common decency is just too stiff, and that justice will never be served. But then the dam breaks and suddenly what had seemed unthinkable starts to become mainstream.
It’s admittedly harder on economics than on social issues. The big money boys don’t care much what people do with their private parts. Wall Street is more interested in controlling people’s back pockets than their front zippers. But times are changing on that front, too. It’s going to take some time. It’s going to seem impossible, and there are going to be setbacks.
But just as with marriage equality, we are going to win. We’re going to win because the history of middle class peoples being slowly ground into poverty suggests that they don’t tend to take it lying down. We’re going to win because the only reason the plutocrats have been able to escape their electoral comeuppance so far is by driving a wedge of racial and sexual resentment into a generation of people who are now aging out of the electorate with no one as easily conned to replace them. We’re going to win because economic and environmental realities require us to win, or else watch the planet burn and societies be driven into two-class feudalism.
Big economic and political change works like punctuated equilibrium. Nothing changes for a long time–until suddenly it does. And then everything changes quickly.
That change is coming. Don’t give up and don’t despair. We’re going to win this.
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