The American Debate: Gay marriage is a dead political issue

Eight years is an aeon in politics. Witness the waning potency of the gay-marriage issue.

During the 2004 campaign, Republican strategists put gay marriage on referendum ballots in key swing states, as a "wedge" issue to unnerve Democrats and gin up the conservative base for President George W. Bush. The Massachusetts high court had just ruled for legalization, and hostility toward the concept was the centrist position in America.

This is no longer true.

Granted, social conservatives voiced anger Tuesday when, for the first time ever, a federal court of appeals declared that gay marriage was a constitutional expression of equal rights. But most Americans will shrug and move on. As evidenced by all the polls, tolerance is the new centrism.

Case in point is the subplot that stars Vaughn Walker.

As a federal District Court judge in California, he wrote the original ruling in favor of gay marriage, back in August 2010. When he retired seven months later, he confirmed long-standing rumors that he was gay. Conservative litigants pounced on the news and insisted his ruling be shelved, on the grounds that he had concealed an inherent conflict of interest, namely, that he was "an active practitioner of the homosexual lifestyle."

Note the inherent bigotry in that argument. On appeal, these conservatives basically contended that all gays, by definition, have a political agenda, and that a gay judge in the grip of this agenda is incapable of rendering a credible verdict. This was the first time a federal judge had ever been targeted on the basis of sexual orientation, but it was actually an old tactic, dusted off from the '60s, when it was used to impugn the credibility of black and female judges.

Back then, some litigants insisted that black judges recuse themselves from civil rights cases (being black was supposedly an inherent bias) and that female judges should recuse themselves from sex-discrimination cases (being female was supposedly an inherent bias). The assumption, naturally, was that only white male judges, by dint of being white and male, had the requisite intellectual skills to rule impartially.