Conservative columnist George Will suspects that the Supreme Court could support equal rights for LGBT people because “quite literally the opposition to gay marriage is dying… it’s old people.”

On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would take up cases on California’s Prop 8 same sex marriage ban and the federal government’s Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denies benefits to gay and lesbian spouses.

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Will on Sunday suggested that it was not a coincidence that the court decided to hear the cases just a month after voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington backed marriage equality.

“It could make them say, ‘It’s not necessary for us to go here,'” Will explained. “They don’t want to do what they did with abortion. The country was having a constructive accommodation on abortion, liberalizing abortion laws. The court yanked the subject out of democratic discourse and embittered the argument.”

He continued: “On the other hand, they can say it’s now safe to look at this because there is something like an emerging consensus. Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying… it’s old people.”

Republican strategist Mary Matalin, who has previously said that marriage equality is not a civil right, asserted that polls now show Americans support same sex marriage because they know it’s not a “threat to the civil order.”

“Well, because Americans have common sense,” she explained. “There are important constitutional, biological, theological, ontological questions relative to homosexual marriage. People who live in the real world say, the greater threat to the civil order are the heterosexuals who don’t get married and are making babies. That’s an epidemic in crisis proportions. That is irrefutably more problematic for our culture than homosexuals getting married.”

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Watch this video from ABC’s This Week, broadcast Dec. 9, 2012.