Will gay unions follow path of interracial ties?

WASHINGTON — As a political, legal and social issue, same-sex marriage seems to be now where interracial marriage was about 50 years ago.

A large majority of the public and most politicians say they oppose gay marriage. Some church leaders say it violates natural law and the Scriptures. A movement growing in political importance is pressing for equal rights for a minority. And a state high court has thrown out a law prohibiting such marriages. All that was true of interracial marriages shortly after World War II.

Today, interracial marriage has strong public support, and no successful politician or prominent public figure favors outlawing such unions. The question is whether gay marriage is on the same trajectory or is so fundamentally different that it will never be legalized.

Same-sex marriage moved to the forefront last month after Massachusetts' highest court ruled that gay couples have the right to marry under the state's constitution. The court repeatedly cited decisions on interracial marriage a generation ago as precedent.

"Recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of the same sex," Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall asserted in her majority opinion, "will not diminish the validity or dignity of opposite-sex marriage, any more than recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of a different race devalues the marriage of a person who marries someone of her own race."

David J. Garrow, a civil rights historian at Emory University in Atlanta, said he thought gay marriages would soon become as unremarkable a part of American life as marriages between whites and blacks. "I would make the argument that American popular opinion about gay people has been changing even faster than American popular opinion changed with regard to race and interracial marriage," he said.

But another constitutional scholar, Douglas W. Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University in California, disagreed. "People will have to ask themselves, 'Does gender matter?"' he said. "If people seriously reflect on that, they will say it does matter in a way history ultimately proved that race does not matter."

Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor and the author of a new book, "Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption," said in an interview that gay marriages would probably follow the same path as interracial unions, but that it might not be soon. "There is still punch to the political forces that don't want gay people to be able to marry," he said.