There’s a reason that we look back at Civil Rights legislation and see leadership. Politicians, litigators, and activists were pushing for rights that the public wasn’t necessarily ready to extend.\u00a0In comparison, today’s power brokers appear to be following public opinion, changing their mind because the wind is suddenly blowing a new way.<\/p>\n I’m sure there are politicians out there taking risks at the local level. On the whole, though, this doesn’t look like leadership, it looks like political expedience.<\/p>\n Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For those of us in favor of same-sex marriage rights, it’s been an exciting few years. Politicians and\u00a0legislatures have been increasingly tipping toward marriage equality. Lots of us are commending the powerful and high-profile individuals who have decided to support the cause. But, let’s not be\u00a0too grateful. A figure at xkcd puts this in perspective. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":64409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2088,253,272,85,283,285,20063,54,23643],"class_list":["post-64408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender-marriagefamily","tag-history","tag-marriagefamily","tag-politics","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-prejudicediscrimination","tag-sexual-orientation","tag-sexual-orientation-prejudicediscrimination"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/10\/24.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64408"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65486,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64408\/revisions\/65486"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"2\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/10\/24-500x292.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n