Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year, you are no doubt aware of Proposition 8, the anti-gay-marriage statute in California, which passed with 52.5 percent of the vote, thus outlawing the then-ongoing gay marriages taking place in the state. (Similar measures were passed in Florida and Arizona during this cycle, but the California one got more press for a variety of obvious reasons, such as the fact that gay marriages had actually happened in CA and that CA is viewed as very liberal.)

I was talking about this result with a friend, and she expressed complete bewilderment that so many people voted against gay marriage (technically a yes-on-8 vote; as a side note, this language may have fooled some people, but it works out, because those people deserve to have less of their vote counted on general intelligence grounds -- I probably shouldn't have mentioned this aspect of my personal social Darwinism, but I hope you will give this essay a fair shake on its own merits.) I, in turn, expressed bewilderment at her bewilderment, but it's not really unique to her; many people seem stunned that so many people voted against gay marriage. This is partly because the argument for gay marriage seems very simple (as expressed in the No on 8 ads here): regardless of how you feel about this, it's wrong to deny people rights. This is part of the standard liberal orthodoxy: what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes and lives should not be something that the government legislates against.

Now, I personally cannot vote (being Australian in name only), but if I could I would certainly have voted no on 8. It seems to me, however, that there are a bunch of non-retarded (as it were) reasons to vote against Prop 8, and that not everyone who did it is necessary a raging bigot who hates gay people. After all, if that's true, then a majority of Californians are hardcore bigots, which I find hard to believe.

First, there is the self-interest argument. Giving gay people things like benefits (this particular case doesn't apply, because civil unions/domestic partnerships already grant these benefits) has its cost on the rest of us; if suddenly there are a bunch more people receiving benefits from my employee health plan and not contributing to it, my premium goes up, which usually means a decrease in salary. Similarly, when all those white people in the South in the early to mid 1900s prevented black people from voting, while many of them were certainly very racist, a related sensible argument was that the fewer people vote, the more your vote counts. Sure, some of that manifests itself consciously as "those damn niggers don't deserve to vote," but it's a perfectly base and sound Darwinian feeling.

Of course, as society evolves, those Darwinian feelings are incentivized and legislated out of us. Despite my philosophy, I'm not really against it; to be blunt, this is the purpose of government, to be the punisher that is necesary to force cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma of life. Nonetheless, especially when people form delineated groups (gay versus straight, black versus white, Yankees versus Mets), it's easy to vote against what the other people want, on the grounds that there is only so much pie to go around.

Now, most people who voted yes on 8 were presumably religious, and that seems to be one of the critiques: that the Mormon church and other religious institutions poured tons of money into the state to convince people to vote yes on 8. This is factually true. However, unless you believe that voter fraud was going on, this is a huge scapegoating; the Mormons did not force anyone to vote, especially considering we have a secret ballot in this country. People probably pressured their neighbors to vote instead of staying home, but all causes do this; liberals put just as much pressure on their communities to vote as conservatives do. The bottom line is that everyone who voted yes on 8 chose to do so. If they chose to do so because they are Mormons and their church leadership told them to do so, why is that an invalid reason to do something? These people trust the moral guidance of their elders. We have decided that these people get 1 vote, just like more "enlightened" people. As someone smart once said, everyone loves democracy except when it goes against them.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I don't think of this advertising as brainwashing. I think of it as presenting arguments. You can't buy votes with money; you can only express opinions and promulgate information, sometimes false, but that's for the voter to decide, as it should be. (It is up to the voter to assess the credibility of their source; if the Mormons consistently lied, I imagine they would lose clout rather quickly.) If NAMBLA suddenly got a very rich supporter and poured lots of money into advertising, they could not accomplish a damn thing; the Mormon advertising was convincing because people believed what was in it, and because it expressed opinions and arguments that people agreed with. Blaming the Mormons is an easy way out (although, of course, it is surprisingly ironic that a religion with a long history of non-traditional marriage in its own right would be one of the main combatants against this.)

So what happened in the minds of the individual voters? Allow me to hazard a couple of guesses. First of all, I think most people are actually fine with what people do in their privacy of their own home. It's what goes on in public that makes them uncomfortable. Watching two people of the same sex walking down the street holding hands is weird-looking to the vast majority of Americans. The simple visual does not jibe with their perceived environment, and it takes them out of their comfort zone. People love being in their comfort zone, and it's not that they hate gay people per se; they just want to be able to relax. To them, it's like a big splotch of red in the middle of an otherwise comforting painting, much like litter or homeless people or smog would be. To them, it feels like being in a foreign country (and I can't deny that I feel this way when I find myself in an environment unlike my usual one, such as the Castro in San Francisco, where most people are gay and expressive about it, or the South, where people are fat and have incomprehensible accents.) It doesn't feel like home. The trigger from that image to "gay people are destroying my world" is a short and understandable one.

Second of all, people are nothing if not protective of their children (or of any future children they might have.) They have no problems with gay people existing in gay neighborhoods or cities or whatever; they can choose not to live there. But having to expose their children to gay people, which they see as increasing the risk of their children becoming gay themselves, is worrisome. They see things as an uneasy detente; because they are not legally recognized as equal to straight people, gay people tend to stick to themselves or in favorable climes, and there is no reason why they would invade a town like (say) Bakersfield, CA. However, if they feel more legitimized, the argument goes, they will feel perfectly comfortable living their lifestyle anywhere, possibly next door, and possibly having children of their own. What if your children end up playing with their children?

Now, this argument, while it may seem paranoid, is probably fairly well grounded in Darwinism, once again. People want their children to become procreators, otherwise said children are ultimately worthless (from a genetic standpoint), so protecting them from "the gay" is an entirely reasonable thing to do. Even if their children have the "gay gene," if they don't express it, they may produce offspring who don't, which is stil useful. The only remaining step is that exposure to gay people increases the chance of living a gay lifestyle oneself, which seems undeniable.

Incidentally, I've always thought that anti-gay religions were sort of misguided. By pressing gay people into the closet, and forcing them to live "normal" lives, they are hurting their efforts to eradicate these people, because the ones in the closet reproduce and pass on the gay gene. However, I've come to realize that this is not so self-destructive; after all, gay-married people can certainly have biological children themselves (although I refuse to believe that anyone could ever raise a non-biological child with the same ardor that they would raise a biological one. Studies confirm this, but then again, being gay itself is similarly inexplicable from this perspective, so who knows.) And we've already seen how it works; gay community -> demand for rights -> gay children. Currently, it seems to me that preventing gay people from adopting is similarly short-sighted; a half-biological child in a marriage has got to be an ultimately acceptable substitute for adoption. That said, the closeting perpetuated by traditionalists certainly smacks of putting your finger in the dike (um, no pun intended), which ultimately results in an overflowing reservoir which, when it is unleashed, will have far more power than it would have if allowed to run free.

Anyway, Darwinist arguments aside, I certainly think that the crux of most of this is in fact religion. But the kids are where it really comes in; live-and-let-live is fine for mainstream America (as opposed to the liberal and conservative extremists who in fact make up a very small minority of the voting population), but when these people threaten to corrupt their kids (and I don't believe that most people think of gay people as evil corrupters; it's just that the presence of gayness in the general population means de facto that kids are exposed to it, which these people view as a potentially dangerous influence for reasons outlined above), that is crossing the line and we get Yes on 8.

Incidentally, it's worth noting in this context the following poll, taken as recently as 2007 by Gallup. The poll question was: would you ever vote for a ____ person for president? Here are the values and the percentage who would:

Ignoring the John McCain smell test, which has to do with presidency and not bigotry, whether people actually feel this way or whether this is a Bradley effect, it is some measure of prejudice in our society. This table pretty much shows that traditional bigotry has mostly faded (or at least is perceived to have faded), but marriage is still viewed as sacred (people who flout it twice don't grade out so well, although you could argue that that is a choice and/or reflective of someone's personal qualities in a way that the other items aren't), and gay people have some work to do. But check out the bottom list. Even assuming that the two are subsets of each other, 10 percent of people would vote for a homosexual for president, but not an atheist! Who are these people?

As an atheist, I certainly do hope that they don't take away my right to marry. Vote no on Proposition 1007, please.