Our good friends at Rashomon reference a recent Gallup poll that suggests a popular backlash against gay rights. I must say that I don't find that poll particularly credible in the long run -- at the very least, the acceptance situation has never been better for homosexuals in North America, and I suspect, even with temporary regional setbacks, things will only get better.

Seven of the nine Democratic presidential candidates recently spoke in a Human Rights Campaign forum. Three said they support same-sex marriage. (All nine answered a questionnaire [.pdf] from the HRC.) The right to marry (or at the very least its legal equivalent) is a very real possibility, within the very near future.

I notice two things from the poll: One - "[T]he level of support for legal homosexual relations has dropped 10-12 points in a period of just two months." This indicates to me that these are the people whose support was weak at best, and who probably shouldn't have been counted upon too strongly in earlier polls. Two - "The same basic patterns exist in both samples: (1) young Americans are more tolerant than older Americans..." I, for one, believe that children are our future. Today's youth has grown up with the idea (by and large) that you don't discriminate against gays, and they're going to stick to that notion.

David Brooks, every liberals' favorite conservative pundit, recently had this to say, on PBS's Newshour:

By almost two to one, people under 30 approve of it and say homosexuality is an acceptable lifestyle. I see it in my own conservative insular world like many conservatives and people in the Bush White House, when I wake up in the morning, I log on to Andrew Sullivan.Com, a gay conservative web logger writing from Provincetown. All these Republicans, their first human contact in the morning is with a gay Catholic. That's just typical of the way the whole issue is changing. So there is another saying that intellectual history moves forward in a hearse. And I think there will be a gradual move as this young generation goes through the age groups of a greater and greater acceptance of gay marriage.

Now, I'm not fooling myself -- things ain't perfect. But we've come a hell of a long way. And the complaints of a few medievalist zealots isn't going to turn the momentum around.

America is ready.