Barone on Same Sex Marriage

Michael Barone has a piece up on changing attitudes to same-sex marriage:

[W]hile opinion on one controversial cultural issue, abortion, has not changed much, opinion on same-sex marriage has changed vastly.

Why? One reason is probably that as people learn that friends and relatives are gay, they become more sympathetic to gay rights. We see a similar change in voters’ willingness to elect openly gay candidates to Congress and other offices.

But increasing support for same-sex marriage causes problems for politicians. When two-thirds of voters were opposed, it didn’t: Almost everyone opposed it. Possible exception: Barack Obama, running for state Senate in a university-dominated district in 1996.

What’s the political problem?  It turns out that blacks and Hispanics are much more culturally conservative than the Democrat elites:

In a 2008 referendum in California, 70 percent of blacks voted against same-sex marriage. A same-sex marriage bill was defeated this year in Maryland after black Democratic legislators opposed it. Same-sex marriage would be legal in California and Maryland were it not for opposition by black voters.

This is going to be an interesting election.