Dem
51
GOP
49
The Senate was first to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, then the House. Yesterday, in a carefully staged and well-attended signing ceremony, President Joe Biden applied his Joe Hancock, making it official.
At the moment, all states (and D.C.) are required, per the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges to issue same-sex marriage licences and to otherwise treat same-sex marriages the same as opposite-sex marriages. With yesterday's signing, states will still be required to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, even if Obergefell if overturned. This means same-sex families don't have to cringe every time they open the newspaper, for fear of news that Clarence Thomas has gotten a bee in his robes.
Yesterday's signing was a bit of a bookend in two ways. The first is that it was exactly 10 years ago that then-VP Joe Biden went on TV and revealed his support for legalizing same-sex marriage. This was surely political theater, designed to pave the way for Barack Obama to reveal his support for legalizing same-sex marriage shortly thereafter. Still, it was a big moment in American political history, and it highlights how much things have changed in just one decade.
The ceremony was also a bookend for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). This will be the last piece of legislation from her tenure as speaker to be a big enough deal to have a signing ceremony. And she's not just a bystander; part of the ceremony is for the Speaker to apply her Nancy Hancock to the legislation (affirming it was passed by the House). Pelosi's very first speech on the House floor, back in 1987, was to call out the Reagan administration for ignoring the AIDS crisis and to plead with her colleagues to take action. So, she came in fighting for LGBTQ people and she'll go out fighting for LGBTQ people.
Naturally, what we are interested in, going forward, is the political impact. There are many Republican members of Congress who are very unhappy with this legislation. For example, many readers will have seen the clip of Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) crying on the floor of the House as she pushed back against the bill (her gay nephew, who criticized her for this, was present for yesterday's ceremony). Anyhow, we have no doubt that some of these Republican members (though not Hartzler, who is retiring) will use the bill to try to rally their voters in 2024. However, support for legalizing same-sex marriage is up to about three-quarters of the American public, so that approach will only work in very red districts that are never going to go blue anyhow.
On the other side of the aisle, however, we suspect this will be something of a big deal. It's easily distilled into a sound bite ("We saved gay marriage") and it's an issue that connects with progressives and with young voters, two groups that the Democratic Party is always trying to rally to the banner. So, our guess—just an instinctive one, mind you with no data to support it as yet—is that this bill will benefit the blue team much more than it does the red team. (Z)