Close Ohio gay-rights vote mirrors national debate

BOWLING GREEN, Ohio — Thirty years ago, a vote like the one just decided in this university town wouldn't have happened; gay-rights activism hadn't taken root across most of America. Thirty years hence, such votes may seem a historical curiosity in a time of equality for gays.

Right now, though, the gay rights movement is at a tipping point, as epitomized by Bowling Green's divisive referendum on extending anti-discrimination protections to gays. The vote was so close that it took three extra weeks to determine whether the two measures passed.

Nationally, gay-rights supporters and their conservative opponents are trading victories and setbacks, and the public is deeply divided on same-sex marriage. Could the push for full equality be stalled or reversed? Probably not, if public opinion evolves at its current pace.

"All you have to do is look at the demographics and you can see this is as inevitable as anything," said Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor who has studied the civil rights and gay rights movements.

Surveys repeatedly find that young adults, far more so than their elders, support the rights of gays to marry and serve openly in the military. A Gallup poll earlier this year showed, for the first time, a majority of Americans saying same-sex relations were morally acceptable. Increasing numbers of Americans personally know gays and lesbians, and positive portrayals of them abound on TV and in films.

"The more gay-friendly an environment you create, the more people come out as gay," Klarman said. "When people know other people are gay — family, co-workers — they find it harder and harder to dislike them and deny them equal rights."

Social conservatives see those trends as clearly as liberals do, though they may hope for a different outcome.

"There is a sense of inevitability of moral standards diminishing that is frustrating for many," said the Rev. Scott Estep, pastor of a popular Bowling Green church, Dayspring Assembly of God.

The church of 700-plus members, on the Dixie Highway north of town where roadside businesses give way to open farmland, is attended by leading opponents of the two ordinances, though the pastor himself made no formal endorsement of either side.

"I'm concerned about the kind of environment my children will grow up in," said Estep, who considers homosexual behavior one sin among many. He suggested, not despairingly, that his son and daughter "will be faced with a lot more decisions and diversity than I did."