I don't often comment on current political affairs unless I have something personal or unique to a offer.
In the case of yesterday's Supreme Court decision on a national law against gay marriage I have given some thought to the effect this will have on my part of San Franciso. The gay Castro district.
The Castro district is roughly 100,000 gay men and about 80 retail businesses. With tourists the street traffic is very heavy. It can support a sizable retail population.
The city of San Francisco, its Board of Stupivsors, joined with an extreme Lefty gay community to ban all large stores and chains. The store that would have brought the most positive business to the Catro District was Trader Joe's and this was maliciously banned precisely because it would bring so much business to the area.
The gay community is very hostile to large successful businesses and chains like most Lefties but they claim to like small business. There is nothing logical about this. I call it 'commercial pedophilia'. Good businesses always start as a small businesses. If they are very good they are under great pressure from the commercial world to expand and include a much larger geographic area if they are retail.
There has been a very slow movement out of the Castro district over the past 25 years as it has become more comfortable for gays to live in other communities. Acceptance of gays has been extraordinarily rapid compared to any other minority population. Probably because they are predominantly white, educated, socialized to American norms and generally attractive.
With the Supreme Court DOMA decision, the reasons for being a repressed minority will be attenuated even more. This I think will result in more geographic spread and continued assimilation.
Unlike the black community, the gay community is not likely to find another issue to help them maintain their minority status. The black community, long after legal and operational restrictions were outlawed and disappeared, created a whole new range of imaginary slights to justify minority oppression status. In the 80s, it was the CIA selling crack. For the past 20 years it has been local police trying to shoot young black men. Even when such black men point guns at the police, it is still 'anti-black police oppression'.
I could be wrong about the effects of DOMA. My observation is based on the intense gay attachment to marriage despite the equal legal entity of 'civil union' that was created specifically for the gay community.
Living in San Francisco I have no sense of the level of opposition to the Court ruling in the United States. It may be like Roe vs Wade in which the whole country slowly moved to the conservative position in opposition to the Court's ruling.