I’ve been pondering and honestly trying to understand the rightwing freak out over the marriage equality ruling.  What is it that is so alarming, unnatural, perverse about two people who love each other being married?  They’re always talking about god’s law as revealed in nature — well there are gay animals too so obviously if their god is omniscient then gay critters and people are all in the plan, right?

Then I remembered a conversation I had a few years back with my mother-in-law and I realized that while science fiction may not be 100% predictive it actually does a pretty good job of at least exploring potential advances and changes to technology and how the culture will be affected by those changes.  What had caused my mom-in-law’s distress was Dolly the Sheep.  She asked me in breathless tones “What do you think about this cloning thing?”  And my response was a blasé “What took so long?”  Because I had been reading about clones for years before Dolly came baaaaing onto the scene.

It’s the same thing with the idea of gay couples being fully equal under the law.  We’ve been talking about that in science fiction for decades.  And the new media — video games is equally accepting.  In the games that lean more toward role playing you can be straight, gay, lesbian, you can sleep with aliens or you can just shoot things if romance doesn’t appeal.

I actually wonder if one reason young people are so accepting of marriage equality is because science fiction won.  We are popular entertainment on every level and by and large our field presents an accepting view of how societies should behave toward it’s citizens — gay, straight, trans and maybe someday even aliens.