The case comes amid a wave of gay marriage legalization...
This phrase, and the title, mask the fact that in the majority of states same-sex marriage legalization came from court cases, not through legislation or referenda[1].
"America", broadly construed, is quickly changing its mind, too, but this "wave" is more a product of judicial thought than public opinion.
Judicial opinion often follows public opinion more closely than you might think. The constitution did not apply to non-whites until it did. Women did not have equal rights to men, and then they did. It was not the constitution changing but rather the legal interpretation of it.
Edited to add: the court cases do not occur until a significant portion of the population believes in an issue enough to be willing to fight for it. Even then, the courts may take a significant amount if time adjusting their legal interpretation.
You need someone to bring a case to court, yes, but do you need a court case and widespread popular support? Interracial marriage hit 50% approval in the US in the mid-nineties.[0] It was made legal (nationally) in the 1960s.
You seem to have focused on my secondary comment rather than my main point. My point was that judges are a product of society as much as anyone. They may make rulings that are unpopular, but they will rarely make rulings that are unthinkable within our society. As for your example of interracial marriage, there is a stark difference between disapproving of something and thinking it should be a crime.
Yes, it has to be thinkable, but I don't know whether or not judicial decisions closely follow public opinion. With interracial marriage, it doesn't _seem_ to have. (I'll agree there is a difference between disapproval and favoring criminalization, I've seen no data on percentage thinking it should be decriminalized, so I use the data I do have, with a grain of salt.)
My issue is I don't have any data to say whether the judiciary follows closely public opinion, or comes from something else--luck of the draw in who happens to be sitting on the court, for example. (e.g., the change that switched national minimum wage from unconstitutional to A-OK seemed to primarily involved FDR putting friendlier judges on the bench, not an outcry from the public.)
At the same time, after these courts have started legalizing gay marriage, public support for gay marriage has followed. I always suspect it's a chicken-or-egg type of situation. Sometimes there is genuine public support for a given issue. Other times, change must occur first, and then people can see that society hasn't collapsed. Once polls began to demonstrate that more people supported gay marriage than were against it (years after the Massachusetts court decision), politicians began tripping over each other to suddenly become champions of gay rights.
In my own state of Minnesota the courts had nothing to do with legalization. Nothing likely would have changed either unless it wasn't for a bunch of anti gay bigots really pissing a lot of people off by trying to pass an amendment to the state constitution banning it. That misfire caused everyone that gave a shit about not being jerks to humans to fix that crap pronto by getting that amendment killed, then 6 months later fly a middle finger to the same people by getting an amendment passed to allow gay marriage. No courts were needed in this case. Though I recognize that is not the norm so far in the US.
The opposite occurred in the vast majority of cases -- people challenged gay marriage bans and won in court. And many states legalized same-sex marriage simply by virtue of being within a federal circuit that had ruled on the issue.
Right, what I was trying to get at was the Minnesota case isn't that different. They just didn't have the law being challenged in a federal court. In other cases, the law was changed and then it was taken to court. It's not like the courts just decided to make a ruling out of the blue.
Note that the first court decision in the US (in Massachussetts) which led to legalized same-sex marriage was in 2003 with marriage becoming legal in 2004 (national public support at about 42%). Note that this was a state court decision, and public support in Massachussetts may have led what it was in national polls. Most of the final (not lower court decisions that were stayed pending appeal to a higher court which issued the final decision) court decisions -- and the acts by state legislatures not mandated by court decisions -- on the issue have happened in the last few years, with national public support at 50% or above.
It's also encouraging in a way. It's good to know that there are checks in place to prevent the enforcement of laws that violate our fundamental rights.
I suspect that some legislation has been written with this in mind for quite a while now. The laws themselves being an exercise in Overton window type thinking, not with any view that they would stand for long.
If true, this situation becomes somewhat self-perpetuating
Nice analogy. Legislature writes the source code of the law and the judiciary tries their damnedest to compile it into an executable program, rejecting the parts that they can't make sense of.
Legislature is the business people. The executive is the developers. The judiciary is the test team. That's how it's designed in the Constitution. The "original intent" of the judiciary was to be the guys waving their hands frantically saying, "Uh, this is a bug," while being completely ignored because there's a ship date to meet.
Its analysis is also perhaps weakened by not accounting for the backlash from states that passed new legislation to block gay marriages and the recognition of gay marriages.
An interesting contrast might be the UK, which in the space of 10 years moved from a government eventually winning a legislative battle to revise a local government act to remove wording prohibiting "the promotion of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship" in 2003, via civil partnerships the following year to full gay marriage in 2013, introduced by a Conservative Prime Minister who had once supported attempts to block the removal of the ban on "promotion of homosexuality". Opinion polls suggested that majority public opinion shifted in a similar direction over that period of time.
I suspect American attitudes towards perceived culture war will be a little more stubborn...
That is, unless the author considers "America changing its mind" and "judicial thought" to be the same thing. I immediately picked up on this as well, the common theme being what federal and state courts thinks.
This is really one of the most interesting questions in our system. I tend to be in favor of this sort of judicial action, but it's always in the back of my head that I'm only in favor of it because so far it has all gone my way. It is frightening to think that someday I'll find myself on the frustrating side of an issue where only a truly heroic amount of legislation can overrule the opinions of a few tens of legal minds.
That's a point that I've seen many try to make, regardless of their actual opinion on the matter, only to be shouted down. It's as if some people don't understand that such a thing could eventually be used against them. It seems that many people don't consider the long-term effects of their short-term gains. The court system can be fickle, what it does that benefits you today can be reversed in the future to your detriment.
They probably should have left abortion out, since it's not clear that American ever changed their mind on that. Over the last 20 years, it's still roughly 50/50.
They should have indeed left it out. Abortion is a different (and tougher) issue because there isn't just a preconception/prejudice at work -- there are multiple important values in tension with one another.
The article is about a pattern where laws change in a very short span, and abortion fits that pattern. The title is just a misnomer. It should be called "How Fast America's Lawmakers/Supreme Courts change their mind.
Abortion and gay marriage were changed in the courts, so I don't know if that counts as America changing its mind. That being said, I would posit that any increase in the rate of America changing its mind is due to the increase in the rate of information exchange due to advances in communication technology.
Right, few of these "mind changes" are really analogous in terms of how they were enacted. Voter referendums are much more responsive to public opinion (ie something like "America") than legislatures, let alone the higher bar of constitutional change.
You're right that there is not a direct connection between America's laws and America's minds, but the article was clear in what it was reporting.
It would have been interesting to also include information on public polling of these issues, but this information doesn't exist beyond a few decades ago.
I wish there thy y axis was birth year. That way we can see if older people are actually changing their minds instead of just aging into the next bracket.
agree. The south is very religious & a high percentage would say they are Christian over non religious. I bet they verbally support it when asked.. to not be shamed when speaking against it. When it comes to voting, they are against it.
Hmm. This seems to focus on a few issues that neatly fall into a sense of "progress" in social change, in which something changes in a number of states culminating in a Supreme Court decision that causes that change to affect the entire country.
However, it ignores some issues that don't fall into such a pattern. For example, the issue of teaching evolution vs. creation in public schools; where teaching about evolution has never been questioned (as far as I know) in some states, while others have had laws on the books, and there is continuing pressure and laws that offer limited "workarounds" of the supreme court decision in order to promote "teaching the controversy", so it's not really a clear cut case of progress.
Another that isn't covered is capital punishment; some states have never had capital punishment, some have repealed it over the years, and the Supreme Court briefly suspended it nationwide but it was reinstated later, and many states still practice it.
Abortion, which is used as an example in this article, faces a similar problems as teaching of evolution. While abortion was allowed nationwide by Roe v. Wade, states are slowly introducing laws that restrict it so heavily that it's not available to a large fraction of people who need it. The turning point nationwide is being slowly turned back by laws that skirt the existing precedent.
It seems like picking these couple of issues, to show how "it may happen again", is a bit disingenuous without also covering major cases in which change hasn't followed this pattern, or has backslid since the original change.
I don't think capital punishment and creationism follow the same trend as women's suffrage, interracial marriage, etc. The issues in the article started with low state-level support and rapidly gained acceptance across the country; at some threshold the Supreme Court stepped in and said "this is now accepted as law nation-wide.
I don't have the numbers to back this up, but I don't think creation teaching and capital punishment started at a low level of support and rapidly ramped up across many states. State-level legislation on creation-teaching is limited to a few conservative areas. Capital punishment has been around forever and support for it has fluctuated with the times.
I agree that abortion doesn't really fit the pattern of the other issues in the article, though. Supreme court approval seems to have come prematurely in that case.
From its nadir in ~1994 with the federal Assault Weapons Ban, you've seen that ban expired, numerous states liberalize their rights to bear arms (either concealed, or since 2009 or so openly), and the Supreme Court rule in Heller that the 2nd amendment is a protection of an individual right. 4 or so states have bucked that trend, but the overall trend in the past 20 years is, if not fast, directionally clear.
I say it was more like a 30 year process, starting with the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986, which prevented the BATFE from extinguishing US gun culture using the Gun Control Act of 1968, and Florida passing a shall issue law in 1987 which got the carry ball rolling after the predicted "Blood in the Streets!" and "Dodge City!" didn't happen. So if you accept my starting point, neither very fast nor initially directionally clear, nor directionally clear in the last couple or so years.
ADDED: and essentially none of it outside Illinois was forced by the federal courts to date, and that anti-trend looks to continue. Heller and McDonald were nice, but have resulted in very few changes on the ground, nor in the political debate. Although the changes in Illinois are dramatic, extremely so for Chicago and a few of its suburbs, which went from a complete ban on civilian ownership of handguns to shall issue concealed carry (and without automatic prosecution of self-defense cases) in 3 years (!).
As for details, there are currently 7-10 viciously anti-gun states as I count them: unquestioned are California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. Connecticut and Delaware are shall issue concealed carry in practice, but that could change, and Colorado, Connecticut, and Washington state have gotten worse post-Sandy Hook. And of course, the District of Columbia, the subject of Heller, is practicing Massive Resistance, with the Federal court system not really interested in resolution or following the Supremes.
Long story short, acceptance of gun rights has been generally winning over gun control, though the patterns are almost the polar opposite of those reflected in the Bloomberg article.
Edit: It's worth pointing out that, true to form (for America at least), a lot of those states flipped colors as a result of a lawsuit, in which conformant legislation came after the fact.
Edit edit: I don't know how much editorial influence Michael Bloomberg has on Bloomberg News, but as Bloomberg News appears to be anti-gun, and Michael Bloomberg is quite obviously so, might there be a connection?
At the Federal level, only Illinois flipped as the result of a lawsuit, and I can remember only West Virginia flipping due to a state level one. Do you know of any more, not counting the in-process California, Hawaii (both probably doomed) and D.C. lawsuits?
Heller v. DC was like a beacon, basically. Many towns and cities abandoned their DC-like restrictions as a result of Heller, including towns in Illinois (that weren't Chicago, obviously).
Beyond that, you're right, federally there's been very little activity, but a lot of the cases are loosely correlated, such that the cases gradually eroded the resistance to gun rights which paved the way towards gun-rights-friendly legislation.
Or, perhaps I'm romanticizing it. While I'm not in cahoots with the NRA, I do follow gun cases fairly closely, and there's been a fairly constant level of activity since 2008.
Another big thing that I ought to have mentioned in my overall survey of the changes is that most, if not the vast majority of states enacted gun control preemption laws after the Supremes denied cert in 1981 in the lawsuit appealing the outright ban of handgun ownership in Morton Grove, Illinois. Almost needless to say, those didn't include Illinois, which per lawyer David Hardy (http://armsandthelaw.com/archives/2008/11/winnetka_il_rep.ph...) included 6 municipalities with handgun bans. 4 surrendered, to my memory Oak Park with Chicago covering their legal bills and Chicago fought and lost in McDonald (resulting in multiple high six figure checks paid by Chicago to the plaintiffs).
I honestly cannot recall another municipality that reversed, although I wouldn't be surprised a few others did. Given how few major ones have/had handgun bans, just Chicago, D.C. and NYC (outside of a very few politically connected), and what a big deal it was nationwide when Morton Grove pulled their stunt, I'd be disappointed with my news sources if I'd missed any.
You're probably not wrong, but to put my earlier comments into light, Morton Grove was one of the ones who reversed their position legislatively as a result of the Heller decision.
I think it's fair to categorize Morton Grove either way, but perhaps it is errant of me to imply close correlation.
Edit: Actually, I recant. Many cities have overturned legislation as a result of suit, but looking at the context, we aren't talking about cities, we're talking about states.
As to the discussion on how states go from rights-restrictive to rights-permissive, I agree that it has predominately been done legislatively.
Errr, no, I'm talking about both states and cities.
Although maybe some other cities in non-preemption states, but the only ones I can remember are Illinois, Nebraska (it came up after the state went shall issue), and Colorado for Denver, but that was carved out by the courts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Colorado#Denver).
This is interesting enough that I checked all the Wikipedia pages after only finding vague "almost all states": Illinois has now preempted most regulations. Massachusetts has "limited preemption", but I remember it to be pretty general. Nebraska is in "most but not all", so I assume the shall issue issues were ironed out, as I vaguely recall. New Jersey is limited (no surprise, it and Massachusetts really would like to outlaw guns altogether and mere ownership is massively restricted), New York of course. Basically Morton Grove's handgun ban lit a fire under state legislatures, most date from the mid-80s.
The above excludes things like some states allowing some cities to outlaw carrying in parks and the like, the usual discharge laws, plus various grandfathered laws, none super-onerous as far as I know aside from registration in Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas).
Then again, there's been a whole lot of lawsuits to enforce state preemption; that's not Heller based, but it is of course done in the courts. At least a couple of states have made it particularly expensive for cities to resist, legislatures don't like their authority being questioned....
But their raw change has been massive. When I came of age, I could not: carry concealed in my home state or more than a hand full of them, or buy ammunition mail order, and the BATFE was in the process of exterminating US gun culture.
Since then I cannot buy a machine gun manufactured after 1986, nor an imported "assault weapon", nor buy a gun from a dealer without an "instant check", and as fiatmoney mentioned, nationally "assault weapons" have mostly cycled.
With a few exceptions, gun rights have, for the most part, expanded over the past couple of decades. More and more states are adopting some form of carry laws, and to my knowledge, those that have expanded gun rights have never reversed. The one notable exception that comes to mind is Colorado, with its ammo capacity ban, but even that's sort of up in the air at the moment.
There's a new line of attack you might not be aware of. Well protected by his own armed security Bloomberg is now the most effective gun controller (he and his people engineered the Colorado debacle, and gerrymandering is likely to keep it all), and he's pursuing deceptive transfer laws through state initiatives, with initial success in Washington state.
These laws ostensibly regulate private transfers, but in the fine print are aimed directly at hindering the creation of new gun owners and otherwise trapping us in flypaper, by criminalizing the lending and renting of guns even under supervision. The Washington state officials say they won't enforce that part of the law, but....
Next up are Nevada and Oregon, last time I heard about this.
The Oregon situation was particularly questionable, and I was saddened that I591 was narrowly defeated.
The chaos agent in me was hoping that 591 would pass alongside 594, to see how the state would have to reconcile directly conflicting bills. Sadly, 591 was massively outspent.
When you're fighting the 13th wealthiest person in the world, who can also get other billionaires to join in at least for Washington state (note to others, there were Washington state initiatives), you're going to get outspent heavily. We haven't yet figured out how to counter him, and like e.g. the BATFE, might not until there are enough atrocities to wake people up to the threat. Which would require an anti-gun state's people passing one of these, and the state then using it as more flypaper. Less likely with less viciously anti-gun states like Washington.
On the up-side, at least you haven't run into the "confiscation through anonymous tip line" issue, yet.
I am hopeful that, eventually, for-cost registration schemes will eventually go the way of the dodo, as I personally equate them to a poll tax, so either the laws will be rescinded on those grounds, or FFL fees will be eliminated, which should ameliorate at least some of the issue.
I'm a long way from Washington. Is the current interpretation of I594 being applied to temporary transfers? I'm in Maryland, and we have a similar transfer limitation, but were at least able to press the AG into issuing a formal opinion on some aspects of the law, though the specifics of it currently elude me.
I'm in Missouri, so paradise compared to Maryland, and initiative wise better than Washington. Heck, our recent constitutional amendment on the subject (http://ballotpedia.org/Missouri_Right_to_Bear_Arms,_Amendmen...) ought to make such an initiative impossible, but the one very bad thing about the state is our courts. So I'm not following Washington state closely, but as I recall there was an "on pain of lawsuit" AG opinion/pledge not to prosecute on temporary transfers. Or see Colorado where the authorities promised not to prosecute folks who left their guns with friends during the nasty flooding not long after the Bloomberg laws passed.
But of course each state's enforcement will be different, and subject to change. The really nasty states didn't start out enforcing their laws in truly nasty ways until the zeitgeist changed enough and laws aimed for blacks and disfavored immigrants were applied to all but the anointed.
The problem with the analysis re: Marijuana is that it appears to leave out the anti-drug treaties we've signed with other UN members. As I understand it, federal legalization is a nonstarter w/r/t that agreement.
Any treaty that's inconvenient will be abandoned, with hardly a second thought. Those treaties are the least concerning challenge in the entire legalization process, they are truly irrelevant.
Nothing will happen to the US if it abandons those treaties. It'll be a blip in the news for one day, as a few grumbles are heard. Other than that, what you'll hear is mostly cheering and celebrating.
Other countries will take it as a cue that the global war on drugs the US has been prosecuting is now over, and they will begin legalizing (this is already underway). It's no longer a question of if; at this point nothing will stop the inevitable rolling back of the war on drugs, the momentum is overwhelming.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding has always been that the US has been the one pushing for those treaties. If that is the case, it seems possible that if anti-Marijuana policy loses support here, its support in the UN won't be so strong.
Or perhaps the US has a fairly nuanced understanding of international law, and when it can circumvent it, when it can ignore it by expending some power or international good-will, and when it will cost too much.
This is an interesting analysis, but it would be more interesting to look at the generalization of the trends, rather than the cherry-picked examples of "interesting" policies.
Specifically, take all US Supreme Court decisions that resulted in the invalidation of state legislature, and track what the trend looked like in terms of historical trends of states that conformed to the decision before the decision was made.
Is anyone aware of any data sources that would have this information in some form? The complexity seems to be that if a law was struck down by a state in 1956, and the Supreme Court made a decision relative to that law in 1960, determining whether the law would have been struck down could be more subtle than a binary yes/no. But even having this data in a basic form, measuring state legislature activity leading up to a relevant federal court decision, could at least give an indication of how long issues take to gain some momentum.
This ignores the other axes; like state judicial decisions being overridden or validated by the federal level, or other variants, but still would be very interesting.
Want to go back and look at something again? You now have to wait for the animation.
This is objectively bad design. I want static PNGs or SVGs, not JavaScript.
Also, that site got in my shitlist for taking control of my keyboard. I prefer to use the arrow keys to scroll one line at a time, and the stupid JavaScript on that site made that impossible.
Actually, I'd be happiest if that entire page was just a single static .svg file.
Scrolling by arrow key worked as normal for me (Firefox 37.0.2 on OS X). But I do agree about requiring javascript for a rather pointless bunch of animations - they could at least serve up the static images when javascript is unavailable. Its presence even led me to think they would be interactive - I tried clicking on my state, thinking it would be highlighted in the graphs below.
No, it's not. The animations add no information that isn't conveyed by the graph already--it just creates a delay before you can see the information. And changing the behavior of core functionality like the keyboard/pointer will confuse people, and on this page there is nothing to be gained in return.
I like that the animations allow you to follow the trend without much effort of finding the appropriate lines. It's clear, just fast enough, and works smoothly at least on my browser. At the very least, your claims are definitely subjective in terms of usability.
I think the animations do add some spatio-temporal information. Different states get highlighted at different times as the line graph progresses. I can't claim to know much about front-end design but I liked the animations.
I too hate when i don't get to use my computer as i see fit, but you have to admit that every point you have mad, previous to the comment i am responding to now, has been made from a personal, preferential point of view. I am not saying i do not agree with; i am saying its just, like, your opinion man.
You can make objective conclusions about subjective preferences. Most users do not want to wait to see information being presented to them. Nor do most users want to deal with websites that randomly change how their computer works. The distribution of subjective preferences can make design decisions objectively bad.
If you're going to present a graph, the point of that graph is to be understood so it needs to be read easily and promptly.
Animating the graph every time you move up or down the page gets in the way of that analysis. It erases the data you were about to look and forces you to wait needlessly for it to appear again.
Try to look at one graph and quickly go back to a previous one to check it out in comparison or anything. It's absolutely uncomfortable.
While the speed of change is good for these issues, could that speed be detrimental in other scenarios? For example, what if this increases the speed to reverse good policies, such as carbon emissions taxes? What if the speed of change from political influence of much larger entities (corporations) also increases the influence to reverse things even faster?
The title is misleading. "America Changes Its Mind" sounds like it's talking about people's opinions, but the data presented is about legal status at the state level. This is misleading because there's a strong discontinuity there, and the speed at which states legalize something doesn't have to be related to the speed at which opinions change.
For an extreme case, consider some issue where opinions are evenly spread out among all the states, and it very slowly changes, at a rate of, say, 0.5% per year. It would take two centuries to go from all-against to all-for at that rate, yet once you pass 50% you'd expect all the states to switch over more or less simultaneously.
The real world isn't so clean, but the same idea applies. Looking at the data, the recent examples of marijuana and same-sex marriage are changing faster, at more like 1-2%/year, but you can still see that the rate of change in state legalization is way faster than the rate of change of public opinion, as one would generally expect.
And looking at something already settled by the courts, it's also interesting to compare the article's chart on the legal status of interracial marriage with public opinion data:
Note that the "Approve" line doesn't cross the "Disapprove" line until the mid-1980s, long after the USSC had spoken. With same-sex marriage on the other hand, the "Approve"/"Disapprove" cross-over happened a bit over three years ago and the USSC has yet to speak as definitively as it did in Loving v. Virginia.
(One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving. I'm not sure about that.)
> One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving
Not very convincingly, because it did not hold that States cannot deny equal marriage, which would be the equivalent of the holding in Loving.
That was only because it wasn't the question put in front of the court (and the people involved wouldn't have standing to sue if it was, because they had been married of years).
> That was only because it wasn't the question put in front of the court
The "only" here is pure speculation. The fact is that the US Supreme Court has not issued a Loving like decision on same-sex marriage, and that same-sex marriage remains illegal in many states because of that. Therefore, it does not make sense to treat United States v. Windsor (which struck down Section 3 of DOMA) as an equivalent, in the domain of same-sex marriage, to Loving v. Virginia, in the domain of interracial marriage.
The federal government never did something like DOMA on interracial marriage (there was, relevant to Section 3, no federal policy against recognizing state-sanctioned interracial marriages), so Windsor naturally has no parallel among the interracial marriage cases.
What would be interesting would be a graph comparing the repeal of anti-interracial marriage laws to actual incidences of interracial marriages (adjusting for relative populate percentages of the races involved, etc.)
I have a strong suspicion that the results would indicate that America itself doesn't really change its mind all that quickly even after the legal changes take place.
As an aside, it's no accident that women's suffrage coincides chronologically with prohibition. Though it turned out to be bad policy, prohibition was a galvanizing issue that drove many women to political activism, either for religious reasons, and/or in reaction to alcoholism and domestic abuse.
Progressives also endorsed prohibition because local bosses often used saloons as their bases, so breaking up the saloons was seen as a way to cut off corrupt party officials.
It is worth noting that the first two issues were settled via Constitutional Amendments, whereas the second two were decided by the Supreme Court. If I were a betting man, I would bet that the SSM issue will also be settled by the Supreme Court, not by Constitutional Amendment.
It seems that, as a nation, we Americans can no longer settle divisive national (and therefore Federal) issues via the democratic process envisioned by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution: amendment of the Constitution itself. Instead, we leave ultimate decision making power in the hands of the Supreme Court.
Former Chief Justice Earl Warren expressed concern that if the Court's power became too widespread, America would have, instead of democracy, kritarchy: rule by judges.
Correction: It was Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed [1], not Chief Justice Earl Warren [2], who "expressed concern that if the Court's power became too widespread, America would have, instead of democracy, kritarchy". He did so in late July 1953, specifically regarding the not-yet-decided Brown v. Board of Eduction decision of May 1953, in a discussion with one of his law clerks, John David Fassett. He confronted Fassett with the question, "Are you one of those people who believes in krytocracy?" Apparently, he discussed this question at length with his law clerks in the months leading up to the Brown decision. I could find no evidence that he spoke with his Supreme Court colleagues about it, but, then again, I've done no real research.
Also according to Fassett, in a February 1953 memo--three months before the Brown ruling--fellow Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson [3] used the term "a ruthless use of judicial power." Although Jackson did not use the term "krytocracy," Fassett commented, "That was sort of Justice Reed's feeling too--his krytocracy thought was the same thing."
I found all of the above in this article [4].
Finally, it is worth noting that, regardless of certain Justices' concerns about the Constitutional limits of judicial authority, the Brown v. Board of Education ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson by a unanimous vote, 9-0.
It's incredible to see how apparently progressive Kansas used to be. As someone who lives here now, I always assume we're going to be one of the slowest (I guess "most conservative" might be a nicer way of putting it) states to adapt to social change. But I guess I really would have liked the Kansas that existed before the middle of the last century...
From the last graph, it seems like the rate of change (if that's what you'd call it) is closely related to the time period in which the change is taking place, or at least the time period in which the change started. I wonder if this has to do with a general increase in malleability of (judicial) opinions, or faster information transfer, or something else.
Perhaps it's a sampling bias - a slow change that started recently may not yet have been detected to be included on the graph (or may not have enough reliable data to support inclusion).
"In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity — and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top." - Daniel Baldwin
On a long enough timescale (which can still sometime be pretty short) stuff seems to move together. The centre. The fringes. The legislation, the courts. And of course, public opinion.
Democracy form a certain perspective is built in to us. Or at least people (demo) have in built mechanisms for moving together.
The flip-flop is not as fast as the law makes it seem, because a law against X only gets passed when X seems like a real possibility. Nobody was passing gay marriage bans in 1850 -- only when it seemed imminent did people try to fight it.
I also wonder just how far into an article like this you have to read before you can accurately describe it as garbage. You come across nice quotes like "Contraception made it possible for females to conduct campaigns to act on their urges of hypergamy." pretty early on. Is it really necessary to drink the entire bottle of crap before one can safely declare that it is, in fact, crap?
There's a summary right at the top. It's your typical set of men's rights talking points dressed up in sociological bullshit and I'm disappointed to be seeing it on HN, since these lunatics have already ruined much of reddit.
I am impressed at the level of downvotes and vitriol shown towards these subjects on here. I think some of the points are either nonsense or stretching things a bit and I don't agree with all of the conclusions, but there are definitely real issues here, and ignoring and suppressing them will only make the eventual backlash worse. Especially with high-handed methods like downvotes and single-sentence dismissals as garbage.
The obvious analogy is race. Talking about race is hard enough. When someone posts a link from Stormfront about how The Jews Did It then there's no point even trying to engage them in discussion.
This phrase, and the title, mask the fact that in the majority of states same-sex marriage legalization came from court cases, not through legislation or referenda[1].
"America", broadly construed, is quickly changing its mind, too, but this "wave" is more a product of judicial thought than public opinion.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United...