Since the "morality" question underlying President Obama's announcement yesterday will always present a lively bugaboo for idle-handed Puritans and Augustinian neurotics, the only question of real and immediate import is the political, and not the moral, one: that is, whether social conservatives' hatred of Mitt Romney will be trumped by their contempt for human love.
Intensified turnout by the religious right--that's the key, it seems. Less so is the matter of intensified, favorable turnout by the youthful left, which, though we tip our hats to its 2008 electoral participation, generally has been and probably will always remain a fickle, unreliable constituency.
The crusading, hardcore religious right, however, knows how to hate. It knows how to seethe and how to organize and how to take unholy revenge. This is not a bear any careful politician enjoys poking; and it just became at least a wee bit friendlier to the infidel Romney, in places it might really count.
Politico offers an excellent geopolitical overview:
North Carolina ... a pretty shaky proposition for Obama this year already, and it just got shakier.
Florida ... Not only do [its senior citizens] oppose [gay marriage] by lopsided margins, they also vote in disproportionately high percentages.
Colorado ... The new capital of evangelicalism ... [is] not in the South. It’s Colorado Springs.
Nevada ... it’s best not to antagonize [the Mormon] constituency in a swing state like Nevada, where the presidential outcome in 2000 and 2004 was decided by less than 25,000 votes.
Iowa ... The [2010] backlash [against the state Supreme Court's 2009 same-sex marriage decision] was as extreme as it sounds.
Missouri ... a state where Obama’s strength in St. Louis, Kansas City and some surrounding suburbs is counterbalanced by the parts of the state that sit squarely in the Bible Belt.
Ohio ... when Vice President Joe Biden privately argued for the president to refrain from expressing his support, he flagged two states where there could be a backlash — his native Pennsylvania and Ohio.
What politicians fear most isn't their dedicated opposition, which is strategically calculable; what they fear is unpredictability, which expands the number of undefended or potentially indefensible fronts. And Barack Obama, in making the boldest civil-rights move since LBJ wrote off the South, now faces an entirely new battleground, in an entirely new war.
That he made it with loving aforethought, as political demons were whispering "no" over his shoulder, only made it all the more admirable and profound.