A trend toward acceptance of gays

Perhaps that was predictable. In politics as in physics, every action triggers an equal and opposite reaction. Thus the president's pronouncement was the conservative reaction to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's pro-gay marriage rulings as well as to the same-sex marriages taking place in San Francisco.

Now the nation faces the very question Massachusetts has been wrestling with: whether to amend the Constitution to preserve the traditional understanding of marriage or to let legal events in the states run their own course.

That's a difficult issue to debate in an election year, when a dispassionate discussion is hard to have. Which is why, as people approach the issue, it's worth thinking about the changes in attitudes we've seen toward gays and lesbians in our own lifetimes.

Only a few decades ago, a public school teacher couldn't make his or her homosexuality known without a very real fear of being fired.

As late as 1985, the notion that gays and lesbians might serve as foster parents sent some people in this state into apoplexy -- and forced the usually progressive Michael Dukakis to formulate a policy that for a time served as a near ban on such placements. In the same period, a bill to prohibit discrimination against homosexuals in employment, housing, credit, and public accommodations stalled in the state Legislature because of paranoia about AIDS. If the antidiscrimination legislation passed, one conservative lawmaker warned, "Boston might become a mecca for AIDS."

Today, out-of-the-closet gays and lesbians can teach in the public schools without fear of termination. Homosexuals function as foster parents, adopt children, and raise families without much fuss -- but also without the rights, privileges, and protections the state and the nation grant to married couples.

The civil rights movement, though often invoked, isn't completely apt as an analogy for the gay marriage struggle, in that the discrimination African-Americans suffered, particularly in the South, was both more pronounced and less avoidable than that which homosexuals endure today. Still, it should be instructive for everyone to recall the remorse the nation now feels about the way it once treated people of other races, ethnicities, and creeds.Until the 1960s -- which is to say, within the memory of many of today's adults -- large segments of America viewed interracial marriage as somehow posing a threat to the underpinnings of society. Today all but unreconstructed bigots yawn at that notion. Similarly, though of greater vintage, the ostracism that greeted the waves of Irish immigrants to Massachusetts and the prejudice that Catholics once faced here stand as reminders of the way divisions that now appear trivial were once used to rationalize exclusion.

In all those cases, claims of tradition, of the natural order, and of religion were invoked as arguments against broadening society's notion of inclusion. And in all those cases, the lessons of history are clear to those who choose to learn them.

Fears about people different from the majority were misplaced. And those who were against broader inclusion stood on the wrong side.

On an issue this heated, it's probably unrealistic to expect those with a strict religious orientation to change heartfelt views, at least in the short term.

But ours, after all, is a civil society, and the marriage right in question is that of civil marriage. Surely, people who hold public office -- that is, who have sought and accepted the role of deciding questions of fairness not only for themselves but for other citizens as well -- have a particular responsibility to look beyond current controversy and attitudes in search of a larger sense of what is just.

Can voting to amend either the state or the federal constitution -- sacred documents that belong to us all -- in a way that allows contemporary prejudice to limit the possibility of future rights ever square with that responsibility?

History's verdict is clear.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.