Does Court's Marriage Decision Mean Greater Individualism? How About Tolerance?

"It's worth taking a step back from the emotions and technical details of all these events," writes Walter Russell Mead, "to ask about the broader trend they point to."

Superficially, they point to a schizophrenic public: leaning pro-life; increasingly in favor of gay marriage; divided on gun control but unwilling to pull the trigger, so to speak, on significantly tightened gun laws. But on a deeper level, these all look like examples of the biggest cultural-political trend in America: a response to the growing complexity of 21st century life that revives individualism and states’ rights.

Individualism sometimes work for the Right and sometimes for the Left. The right to marry who you choose is as individualistic as insisting on your right to bear arms. With abortion, that same logic is muddier, which is why the public is still divided. Pro-choicers lay claim to the individualism mantle by stating that women should be free to control their own reproductive health, while pro-lifers do the same by arguing that abortion involves two individuals with rights, not one.

Given the nation's divisions, a future of a live-and-let-live individualism sounds appealing, but we've a long way to go to achieve it. The Left's passion for demonizing those with whom it disagrees reached new heights in Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in the Defense of Marriage case, when he disparaged the motives of half the nation as well as DOMA legislators. As Justice Antonin Scalia retorted in his dissent,

Chick-fil-A, Gays, Marriage, and Tolerance

Chick-Fil-A had a great day Wednesday, as did the millions of Americans who quietly showed their support for traditional marriage, free speech, and free enterprise. Fr. Dwight Longenecker called it “the triumph of the ordinary.”

Yesterday’s Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day was the sort of ‘revolt’ this country needs, but it was even better than the non violent revolutions and peaceful protests which have changed the world because it was so ordinary. It was just plain, ordinary Americans getting in their cars and doing a plain, ordinary American thing: going out for lunch to a fast food joint. It was just plain, ordinary Americans doing something plain and ordinary, but positive and joyful and good. In buying an ordinary tasty chicken sandwich at their corner fast food emporium ordinary Americans were expressing the wish to be left alone to be ordinary Americans.

Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are a tiny fraction of the U.S. population—3.5% at most, according to demographer Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA. (The population is even smaller in the United Kingdom, where a national 2010 Integrated Household Survey found that only 1.5% of Britons say they are gay, lesbian or bisexual.)

Yet they so militantly promote their lifestyle and agenda that they have fooled many Americans into believing that they are a much larger segment of the population.

A 2011 Gallup survey found that only 4% of American adults estimated—correctly—that gays and lesbians were less than 5% of the U.S. population.  Over half (52%) of adults in the U.S. thought 1 in 5 Americans were gay, and 35% of adults thought 1 in 4 were gay.  Women, young people, lower-income and less educated Americans have been snookered most (see chart below):

Americans with lower incomes and less education give the highest estimates, on average, of the U.S. gay and lesbian population, and far higher estimates than those with higher incomes and more education. Americans aged 18 to 29 give a higher average estimate than older Americans, and women give a far higher average estimate than men.

"For all the talk of the traditional marriage supporters being full of hate, there was not hatred apparent” on Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day, notes Fr. Longenecker.  Hate is the currency of the Left these days: Hate for centuries of traditions and definitions that don’t suit its contemporary whims. Hate for speech that isn’t synonymous with its own. Hate for a free-enterprise system that refuses to buckle to the un-ordinary demands of a tiny segment of the population.

No, no hate Wednesday, just (as Fr. Longenecker put it) "ordinary Americans sticking up for their way of life by buying a chicken sandwich with their friends and neighbors.”