The first elected official who ever made the case to me for legalizing gay marriage — and maybe the last, come to think of it — was Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota, with whom I spent a fair amount of time in the late 1990s. A political independent, Ventura swept into office on the simple premise that if the state government, flush with revenue, didn’t actually need all the tax money it collected, maybe it should give some back. His libertarian philosophy extended to social issues, on which Ventura, who counted gay men among his closest aides and friends, said government had no business intruding. As the governor told me then, he didn’t care what the gay couple next door were doing in the privacy of their home, including hanging up a marriage certificate, just as he didn’t think anyone should pester him about keeping a gun in his nightstand. (Ventura’s idea of gun control, he once wrote, was being able to shoot two rounds into the same hole from 80 feet.) Your private life was yours to live, he thundered, as long as you weren’t harming or exploiting anyone else in the process.

Establishment politicians inter­preted Ventura’s fleeting success as a blow to the overly choreographed culture of two-party politics. There was certainly validity to this; it’s notable that the most popular political movies of the ’90s were films like “Bulworth” and “The American President,” in which the nation’s turgid politics are somehow redeemed in a sudden burst of authenticity. But Ventura’s breakthrough foreshadowed a deeper shift too. Americans, and especially younger Americans, were beginning to enjoy a diversity of personal choices unrivaled by any previous generation — choices not just of where to shop or how to invest their money but also of whom to date or which neighborhood to live in, of how to worship and how to educate their kids. They didn’t especially want a government that would limit those choices, for them or anyone else.

Image

A decade later, it is this emergent political ethos that is rapidly asserting itself in the debate over gay marriage, as judges and legislators across the land — most recently Legislatures in New Hampshire and Maine — reconsider the issue. According to the group Freedom to Marry, about 13 percent of Americans now live in a state that allows gay marriage or recognizes marriage licenses issued in other states, and that percentage is certain to rise. The gist of the disagreement now isn’t partisan or theological as much as it is generational. Unlike their parents, younger Americans and those now transitioning into middle age have had openly gay friends and colleagues all their lives, and they understand homosexuality to be a form of biological happenstance rather than of emotional disturbance. They’re less inclined to restrict the personal decisions of gay Americans, even if they don’t necessarily want the whole thing explained to their children as part of some politically correct grade-school curriculum. In a sense, the gay rights movement of an earlier era was so successful in changing social attitudes that the movement itself can now seem obsolete, in the same way that younger Americans who have grown up with the premise of environmentalism in their daily lives consider Greenpeace to be a kind of hippie anachronism.