Game over

Moreover, same-sex marriage is legal in just six states and Washington, D.C., representing a scant 11 percent of the country’s population. So why the optimism?

Gay marriage is no longer working as a wedge issue.

For a long while, conservatives liked to think of gay marriage and abortion as related - if you opposed abortion, then you’d also oppose gay marriage. As with abortion, gay marriage was used effectively as a club against any variety of politicians, often with tremendous electoral success.

But the two issues are quite different. It’s been nearly four decades since Roe v. Wade, but abortion continues to leave people uncomfortable. “Americans are at once pro-life and pro-choice’’ concluded a 2011 analysis of opinion polls by the American Enterprise Institute. That ambivalence was underscored by former President Bill Clinton’s line about making abortion “safe, legal and rare.’’ “Rare,’’ of course, was an acknowledgement that even the pro-choice crowd recognizes abortion has real costs.

Not so with same-sex marriage. While the argued harm of abortion is ending a potential life, it’s hard to see what damage might be caused by gays getting married. If anything, gay marriage - like all marriage - discourages promiscuity in favor of building long-term monogamous relationships. This, of course, is a state of affairs that conservatives should want.

Then too, the one-time fears that homosexual marriages would somehow undermine heterosexual relationships have not been borne out. In Massachusetts, the divorce rate has actually dropped since the introduction of same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriages themselves are, like all marriages, pretty noncontroversial - you’ll find pickets at abortion clinics but not outside a gay couple’s home. The result has been a dramatic change in attitudes. A Gallup survey from May found a majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage. A year ago, the figure was only 44 percent.