Please provide a link to this alleged "increasingly encroaching and obnoxious and arrogant Gay Agenda"
I have no link.
I'm serving up personal opinion, with respect to how the Gay Rights Agenda is being perceived in mainstream America, beyond the reach of some of polls that have been cited here...
I saw an overwhelming show of support for Chick-Fil-A in 2012 and a public relations disaster for the Gay Lobby, as an outcome of that incident...
I saw an overwhelming show of support for Duck Dynasty cast in 2013 and a public relations disaster for the Gay Lobby, as an outcome of that incident...
These massive outpourings of public support for the OPPONENTS of the Gay Lobby should tell us something about the unreliability of the polls being cited...
Consider them the
Canary in the Coal Mine, for our purposes here...
Ignore that Canary to your very great peril...
Still, outpourings of public support for the OPPONENTS of the Gay Lobby don't amount to diddly squat, until it materializes into Law...
And efforts at such Law, on the State level, continue apace...
Which is what we're all doing, haunting this particular thread...
The volume of the noise does not correlate to the actual numbers of people involved. A single car with a booming stereo system passing by can drown out an entire orchestra playing in the park.
So let's put this in perspective. Those "backlashes" are the vocal minority who are opposed to gays. You are correct that it doesn't "amount to diddly squat, until it materializes into Law..." and that is where the rubber meets the road.
So let's recap the opposition to Gay marriage from a legislative perspective. It was a hot button issue in the 1990's and that resulted in DOMA being passed by the anti-gay lobby. Another 30 states chose to enact similar anti-gay marriage laws onto their books.
That was the status quo until the legal challenges to DOMA reached the Supreme Court in the
Windsor case. The sheer unconstitutional discriminatory basis for DOMA was overturned by the majority of the court. However that only invalidated DOMA at the federal level. The court did not invalidate the state laws.
But Scalia was so incensed by the overturning of DOMA that he wrote a 26 page dissenting opinion. In one paragraph he provided the explicit wording that could be used in the
Windsor decision to overturn the anti-gay marriage laws at the state level. Subsequently 5 of the 7 states that have had their anti-gay marriage laws overturned in lower courts have actually cited Scalia's dissent. The latest state didn't even try to fight it and just conceded that it was unconstitutional. There is every reason to believe that the other 23 states will end up having their laws overturned in next couple of years too.
So this brings us to the current attempt to enact anti-gay legislation. In order to be successful it must avoid the appearance of discrimination. With the
Windsor decision now on the books that makes it illegal to discriminate against gays as a class.
This AZ law is a "Hail Mary" pass at attempting to make religious belief into a "protected class" all by itself. But the Constitution specifically forbids state endorsement of any religion whatsoever. So even if it becomes law it will be overturned as soon as it reaches the courts, let alone the Supreme Court.
The fanatical extreme right anti-gay movement is fighting a losing "rear guard" legal battle that flies in the face of the Constitution and individual rights. There is no legitimate basis for encoding discrimination against gays.
Your "Canary in the Coal Mine" metaphor is being misinterpreted. The problem the anti-gay movement faces is that is about to become an endangered species. The demographic shift will continue to work against them as more and more people adopt a realistic approach to treating gays as equal members of society.
