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Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

While the speed of change is good for these issues, could that speed be detrimental in other scenarios? For example, what if this increases the speed to reverse good policies, such as carbon emissions taxes? What if the speed of change from political influence of much larger entities (corporations) also increases the influence to reverse things even faster?

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The title is misleading. "America Changes Its Mind" sounds like it's talking about people's opinions, but the data presented is about legal status at the state level. This is misleading because there's a strong discontinuity there, and the speed at which states legalize something doesn't have to be related to the speed at which opinions change.

For an extreme case, consider some issue where opinions are evenly spread out among all the states, and it very slowly changes, at a rate of, say, 0.5% per year. It would take two centuries to go from all-against to all-for at that rate, yet once you pass 50% you'd expect all the states to switch over more or less simultaneously.

The real world isn't so clean, but the same idea applies. Looking at the data, the recent examples of marijuana and same-sex marriage are changing faster, at more like 1-2%/year, but you can still see that the rate of change in state legalization is way faster than the rate of change of public opinion, as one would generally expect.

A couple of random pages with relevant poll data:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx

http://www.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx

And looking at something already settled by the courts, it's also interesting to compare the article's chart on the legal status of interracial marriage with public opinion data:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_Uni...

Note that the "Approve" line doesn't cross the "Disapprove" line until the mid-1980s, long after the USSC had spoken. With same-sex marriage on the other hand, the "Approve"/"Disapprove" cross-over happened a bit over three years ago and the USSC has yet to speak as definitively as it did in Loving v. Virginia.

(One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving. I'm not sure about that.)

> One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving

Not very convincingly, because it did not hold that States cannot deny equal marriage, which would be the equivalent of the holding in Loving.

That was only because it wasn't the question put in front of the court (and the people involved wouldn't have standing to sue if it was, because they had been married of years).

> That was only because it wasn't the question put in front of the court

The "only" here is pure speculation. The fact is that the US Supreme Court has not issued a Loving like decision on same-sex marriage, and that same-sex marriage remains illegal in many states because of that. Therefore, it does not make sense to treat United States v. Windsor (which struck down Section 3 of DOMA) as an equivalent, in the domain of same-sex marriage, to Loving v. Virginia, in the domain of interracial marriage.

The federal government never did something like DOMA on interracial marriage (there was, relevant to Section 3, no federal policy against recognizing state-sanctioned interracial marriages), so Windsor naturally has no parallel among the interracial marriage cases.

What would be interesting would be a graph comparing the repeal of anti-interracial marriage laws to actual incidences of interracial marriages (adjusting for relative populate percentages of the races involved, etc.)

I have a strong suspicion that the results would indicate that America itself doesn't really change its mind all that quickly even after the legal changes take place.

> What would be interesting would be a graph comparing the repeal of anti-interracial marriage laws to actual incidences of interracial marriages

Not quite, but close enough: http://xkcd.com/1431/

'What if'?

Prohibition is one of the examples - the policies aren't at all guaranteed to be good.

As an aside, it's no accident that women's suffrage coincides chronologically with prohibition. Though it turned out to be bad policy, prohibition was a galvanizing issue that drove many women to political activism, either for religious reasons, and/or in reaction to alcoholism and domestic abuse.

I strongly recommend watching the PBS series on the topic: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition.

Progressives also endorsed prohibition because local bosses often used saloons as their bases, so breaking up the saloons was seen as a way to cut off corrupt party officials.

Who defines whether a policy is "good" or not? You seem to take the definition for granted.

There is no carbon tax at the federal level. America changing its mind on carbon policy would be a good thing.

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