http://swampland.time.com/2013/03/28/how-gay-marriage-won/?iid=sl-main-beltAuthor: David Von Drehle Source: Time Magazine
"A court still stinging from controversies over Obamacare, campaign financing and the 2000 presidential election may be leery of removing an issue from voters' control. Yet no matter what the Justices decide after withdrawing behind their velvet curtain, the courtroom debate — and the period leading up to it — made clear that we have all been eyewitnesses to history. In recent days, weeks and months, the verdict on same-sex marriage has been rendered by rapidly shifting public opinion and by the spectacle of swing-vote politicians scrambling to keep up with it. With stunning speed, a concept dismissed even by most gay-rights leaders just 20 years ago is now embraced by half or more of all Americans, with support among young voters running as high as 4 to 1. Beginning with the Netherlands in 2001, countries from Argentina to Belgium to Canada — along with nine states and the District of Columbia — have extended marriage rights to lesbian and gay couples."
This article goes through how the public and politicians have changed their views on same-sex marriage, and goes through how the concept of same-sex marriage has gone from "joke to commonplace" from the so-called stunt of Jack Baker and his boyfriend filling out a marriage application in 1970, to the AIDS epidemic education on the benefits of marriage for health insurance, to John Boswell's book which offered evidence that the early Catholic church blessed same-sex unions,
Romer v. Evans,
Lawrence v. Texas, and so on so over time, Americans realized gays were not aliens, but people too.
