by Andrew Sullivan

When I was growing up in a rainy isle of industrial stoppages, one phrase leaped to the forefront of national consciousness. A politician, a man best described as a partly house-trained polecat, was asked what advice he would give to the millions left unemployed by Margaret Thatcher’s restructuring of the British economy. “Get on yer bike,” Norman Tebbit replied. Move to where the jobs are.

There was an audible gasp from most sections of right-thinking Brits. But although Tebbit was and is a loathsome creature, he had a point. Sometimes, jobs, rights, security, and a great climate all congregate in one place. Most of the time, however, they don’t. The readers of this paper live in a climate of relentless gray. I’m sure there are compensating pleasures in the Northwest, but if clear blue skies are your lodestar, you should probably get the fuck out of there. And it’s no good whining that you have a RIGHT to clear blue skies. At some cosmic level, you may be right. But in any practical sense, you’re bonkers.

Which brings me to marriage. At the heart of the marriage-rights debate, there’s an important internal conflict. It pits fundamental justice against prudential politics. And the conflict comes from the fact that civil marriage in America is both a states’ rights issue and a fundamental matter of civil rights under the federal Constitution. So what is it? What trumps what? And how can that impact our strategy?

My own view is that the denial of marriage rights to gay people is the greatest denial of civil rights in this country. Marriage is a “basic human right” under the Constitution, in the words of our very own Supreme Court. Every time some legislature has tried to restrict marriage rights on some basis or other–the applicants are aliens, on death row, insane, child abusers, dead-beat dads–the Supreme Court has struck it down. Straight citizens in this country can abuse, undermine, and wreck their own marriages, but they still have a right to as many as they can possibly acquire (as long as they are not engaged in simultaneously). Britney Spears and Erik Menendez and Rush Limbaugh and Larry King and Jennifer Lopez, who between them have wrought almost as much damage to the institution of marriage as Elizabeth Taylor has, have the Supreme Court behind them. But two crusty old lesbians, together 50 years? The world, apparently, is reeling.

At the same time, I’m more than usually aware that attitudes to this glaring injustice vary from state to state. It is safe to say that the inhabitants of rural Oklahoma have a different view on this than, say, the residents of my own adopted village, Provincetown, Massachusetts. One of the staggering features of America, after all, is its vastness and diversity. By diversity, I don’t mean the usual pablum of racially obsessed left-wing bores. I mean real diversity. I mean the bizarre notion that South Beach and Tallahassee are not just in the same country but in the same state. I mean the idea that the West Village and West Virginia are both equally American. Maybe it’s because I come from somewhere else, but I wasn’t in this country for long before I realized that its federal system is not just a curiosity. It’s the only thing keeping this fractious and divided country in one ramshackle piece.

So it behooves those of us who believe in the fundamental right to marry to recognize that many others do not. On a matter of such critical importance to many people, forcing a single national standard on the entire place may not be wise. Take the interracial marriage comparison. It appears unconscionable that any state should now ban such marriages. And the Supreme Court language about “basic human rights” comes from the Loving v. Virginia decision that struck down the miscegenation bans. But for more than a century, the states differed. I repeat: for more than a century. If an interracial couple had traveled across America in the 1950s, they would have been illegal for a few hours, then legal for a couple of hours, then legal, then illegal. And we lived with this. Was it fair? Of course not. Should the courts have struck the bans down? Of course. But courts also reflect public opinion. It was difficult to uphold equal marriage rights when members of one particular race were deemed inferior across vast swaths of America.

And so it is today on the matter of sexual orientation. If we were to force a national referendum on marriage rights for gays now, we would lose it. We’d lose it by a much smaller margin than 5 years ago, but we’d still lose. Moreover, by forcing the issue, we run the risk of giving legitimacy to the bogus demands for a Federal Marriage Amendment, barring gays from full citizenship forever, whatever state they’re in. That’s why it seems prudent to me for the marriage movement to stick for the foreseeable future to a state-by-state strategy. Attempts to litigate the national legitimacy of Massachusetts marriages will only risk disaster–by giving credence to religious-right fears that gay marriage in one state will mean gay marriage in every state.

As a prudential matter, then, why not have equality in some states and not in others? The very existence of diversity also enables us to show more clearly what effect equal marriage rights will have. My guess is that “free” states, which treat their gay citizens as actual citizens, will enjoy more stable marriages, higher levels of economic growth, and more creativity and innovation than those states that enshrine discrimination. Why? Because gay people are good for society and marriage is good for gay people. Gay couples and gay singles therefore can and should get on their bikes or in their SUVs and travel to and live in the “free states.” Let these free states be gay cities on fabulous hills for the entire world to see. Let 38 states ban equal marriage rights. Let Virginia enact a new Jim Crow law, forbidding gay couples from even entering into private contracts to protect their relationships. Screw them. And if you’re gay in those states, by all means fight. But you also have another option: leave. Go somewhere where you aren’t demeaned and violated.

Does this mean abandoning people who do not have the resources or desire to leave, say, Virginia? Of course not. But we can all try hard to gain victories in states that discriminate against us, while some move to states that embrace us. We can prove our case by showing that civilization does not collapse when society treats its gay citizens equally. And experience and example are often more powerfully persuasive tools than mere words. That, after all, is how interracial marriages finally came to be accepted. Interracial couples–legal in some states–by very existence undermined stereotypes, just as the images of couples outside San Francisco City Hall or in Cambridge, Massachusetts, destroyed the notion that gay people are somehow “other” when they are, of course, very much “us.” The power of married gay couples acting as married couples, using the proper words to describe themselves–“husband,” “wife,” “spouse”–is incalculable.

So let’s be federalists for a while. Until public opinion shifts to a deeper understanding of the humanity of gay people, let’s show the world by example what that humanity is. Change does not come instantly. And it takes maturity to see that. If we try to win it all, we could actually lose everything (through the terrifying prospect of a federal constitutional amendment). Call off the lawsuits. Let Governor Romney enforce that ancient 1913 anti-miscegenation law to prevent out-of-state couples from getting married. Wait until the generational shift increases support for our equality. And use our new freedoms–however limited geographically–to demonstrate their benign impact, their humanizing potential, their socially beneficial effects. It worked in the matter of race. With patience, it can work for gay people as well.