This should come as no great surprise:
What to take away from it?
One obvious lesson concerns the power of law as a social tutor: White attitudes toward blacks and segregation and related matters changed dramatically — and, manifestly, for the good — in the wake of certain Supreme Court decisions and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Attitudes toward same-sex “marriage” are changing dramatically now, in the aftermath of Justice Kennedy’s decision in the Obergefell case. Whether for good or ill continues to be a matter of disagreement, though my side is, quite clearly, now in the minority.
Those who support same-sex marriage will, of course, be delighted at the change. But we should all take warning that, given the law’s teaching power, changes in law should be carefully weighed. Obviously, it can teach for bad as well as for good. (Very few today, I trust, would support the Nazis’ anti-Jewish laws or American laws enacting racial segregation.)
One lesson that should probably not be drawn is that young people are always better and wiser than old people — if you’re tempted to think so, consider the Hitlerjugend, Mao’s Red Guards, and the child soldiers of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge — or that the march toward the future is, on the whole, an inevitable march toward the better. Change can be good or bad.
Posted from the south Tyrrhenian Sea