Was Barney Frank right?

To review the history here: In 2004, while the presidential election campaign was raging (the worst possible time, but what are you gonna do?) the Massachusetts court system ruled that the state constitution allowed same-sex marriage, and there was a proposed amendment to ban it. Amending the constitution requires approval in two consecutive votes by the legislature (with a time interval in between) followed by a public vote. The amendment passed the initial convention after much acrimonious and highly public debate.

Rep. Barney Frank argued counter-intuitively that the fight against the amendment wasn't worth it. It would just give religious conservatives a big club to beat liberals with during the national campaign, and, besides, he thought that once same-sex couples had been marrying for a year or so without calamity, the amendment would die either on the second vote in 2005 or on the subsequent popular ballot.

So Bush got narrowly reelected after a campaign that hit the moral-values angle hard (and lots of Democrats blamed gay-marriage advocates in the aftermath). Meanwhile, gay people in Massachusetts kept getting married, the second vote just happened and the amendment in fact went down by a tremendous margin, just like Frank predicted. So was Barney Frank right? Jay Ackroyd says he was.

I'm not so sure. First of all, I doubt that caving on the first vote would have accomplished anything. Massachusetts liberals couldn't control the timing of the court decision, or, for that matter, the behavior of city officials in California, so the issue was going to explode nationally and be exploited by Republicans regardless. (John Kerry was actually against gay marriage, but it didn't help separate him from the issue at all.) And it's not at all obvious to me that opponents' minds would have been as easy to change had the first campaign not urged them to watch events closely. It's true that you have to pick your battles, but worse-is-better switcheroo reasoning tends to be a sign that you've spent way too much time thinking about political strategy.

Second, I have the same concerns as commenter "Glenn in NYC": the vote isn't as good as it looks. The 2004 amendment was conceived as a compromise that would allow Vermont-style civil unions. At least some of the margin against it is really support for a more radical proposed version that will ban civil unions as well.

(Third point, added later: If you recall how this was actually going down at the time, Mitt Romney wanted to halt gay marriage by executive fiat until the amendment had an up-or-down public vote in 2006. Had advocates not pressed him on the illegality of this, there wouldn't even have been any facts on the ground.)

But it's absolutely true that gay marriage seems to be one of those things that many people are terrified of until the moment it becomes real. Those Vermont civil unions that seem so half-baked now were considered profoundly radical in 2000, and were the subject of vehement opposition with apocalyptic rhetoric. Once they'd been real for a while, the opposition inside Vermont mostly evaporated, or at least became quiescent. There is going to be at least one more major fight over this in Massachusetts, and Governor Romney's presidential aspirations are going to keep him fulminating against same-sex marriage. But time is on marriage advocates' side.

America 1939-1945 in photos

via derspatchel and the Library of Congress: Color photos of the US, 1939-1945, from the Farm Security Office-Office of War Information Collection.

This picture categorized under "Tube industry" is lovely.

Radial rail

Matthew Yglesias argues that, in metropolitan areas with good mass transit, demand for gasoline is more elastic than you think, and says something about Boston:

The kind of situation we have here in Greater Washington where for many suburbanites a brief drive to Metro station followed by a ride downtown is a viable alternative to commuting by car all the way downtown would accomplish a lot. I recall that Boston's commuter rail system was set up to work pretty smoothly in this fashion for a large number of suburbanites but the trains and parking lots were, in practice, usually operating well below capacity because people preferred to drive.

That's part of it (though I am definitely not one of those people), but there's something else as well that I've become acutely aware of. Boston's commuter rail system, like the Green Line streetcars before it, is set up entirely for radial travel in and out of the city center. In some industries, though, the employers have all relocated out of the city to office parks in ring suburbs; the workers are assumed as a matter of course to be capable of driving there.

If you don't live downtown, and you're not lucky enough to live near the same radial line as your workplace (as once happened to me by accident, but only for about a year), the commuter rail system is essentially useless for getting between your home and your workplace. You'd have to ride into North or South Station, transfer from one to the other by subway in some cases (which itself involves changing subway trains), and then ride back out again on another train; that's likely to be a multi-hour trek to get to a spot fifteen or twenty miles from where you started. The alternatives would have to be pretty amazingly expensive to make that seem worthwhile.

Buses help fill up the gaps in the inner part of the network, but in the suburbs they're often scarce and unreliable. I also rode a bus to work for years, but even that line was mostly radial; it would have been much harder to do otherwise. (Some people also associate a social stigma with riding the bus, but they are stupid, so I won't say any more about it.)

Transit planners like to talk about the problem of circumferential mass transit, but I'm not sure it's all that solvable. More likely we'll have to see land-use patterns, especially for commerce and offices, change back toward greater centralization as a result of rising oil prices. That will just make rent in the city even more expensive, but at some point employers may see urban locations as worth the price again.