Many people marvel at how quickly public opinion on same-sex marriage is changing, as if there's just no explaining it.
Pundits prattle about how LGBT people seem to gain civil rights almost by the month while blacks and poor people are losing ground at least as quickly, as if there's just no explaining that, either.
But massive social shifts don't happen just because some fairy waves her wand (OK, sorry -- I'll light a candle for myself over that one).
Ian Millhiser at Think Progress reports a stark explanation that sounds as real as it is ugly:
"According to Pam Karlan, a Stanford [University] law professor who now serves as the Justice Department's top voting-rights attorney, 'very few upper-middle-class people wake up to discover that their children are poor. Very few citizens wake up to discover that their children are undocumented. Very few white people wake up to discover that their child is black,' but even the most staunchly anti-gay parent can wake up to a phone call from their child telling them that he or she is gay."
In other words, when the privileged began discovering en masse that their own children or neighbors were LGBT, minds began to open on that front. Poor people, black people, undocumented people ... well, "those people" are not "us" so to hell with them.
We can only hope that when the members of the gay community chant "Gay rights are human rights," they mean it.
Many black activists were among the first to endorse civil rights for LGBTs. Immigration activists and advocates for the poor are pretty much unanimous in supporting those rights.
We're entering a time when gays can either prove they deserve the respectability that seems within reach or they'll make it clear that their political allies should have looked out for themselves and let gays keep going to jail just for being gay.
I'm hoping that gays prove to be worth all the hard work done on our behalf, but I'm not ready to begin holding my breath just yet.