July 17, 2006
Was Nixon Right? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:30 PM EST In the early 1970s Richard Nixon strongly considered appointing a woman to the Supreme Court, in part to defy conventional wisdom that he was a steadfast social conservative, and in part because his wife, Pat Nixon, who normally maintained an arm’s length from politics, had argued forcefully—though still privately—for the importance of such a move.
One of the people at the top of Nixon’s wish list was Rita Hauser, whom he had appointed U.S. representative to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Hauser was an accomplished legal scholar who had Nixon’s ear on matters concerning gender equality. But when Hauser argued that same-sex marriages could be legal, the President decided she had outlived her usefulness. “There goes a Supreme Court justice,” he told his domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman. “I can’t go that far—That’s the year 2000. Negroes [and whites]—OK; but that’s too far.”
This conversation took place in 1970, only three years after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Loving v. Virginia, striking down state laws that banned interracial marriage.
Nixon, who was usually a shrewd student of political trends, may have been a little optimistic in his assessment of the American public’s capacity to absorb or embrace sweeping social changes. But not by much.
In 2004 the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 42 percent of the public strongly opposed gay marriage. In 2006 that figure dropped to 28 percent.
Broken down by age group, in 2004 32 percent of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 strongly opposed gay marriage, compared with 58 percent of those aged 65 and older. In 2006, only 25 percent of young people strongly opposed gay marriage, compared with 33 percent of senior citizens, 30 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64, and 26 percent of those between the ages of 30 and 49.
He was off by a few years, but the trends seem to show that Nixon was right. By and by, Americans are becoming more comfortable with the idea of gay marriage.
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