> This is a cherry-picked example and a bad-faith argument.
What’s the trend of claiming arguments are in “bad faith?” It’s like a verbal tic people have developed recently.
I didn’t “cherry pick” anything. The very first step of the author’s analysis was to exclude states that had banned same-sex marriage prior to Obergefell on the theory that federal law could be changed. That exclusion carried through all the subsequent winnowing steps of the author’s analysis, because each step built on the previous step. By the author’s own logic—that she wouldn’t want to live in a state that had banned same-sex marriage prior to Obergefell, because of the potential for changes in federal law—California should have been crossed off the list.
It’s fair to say public opinion in California has changed since 2008, but that’s true all over the country. I’m just applying the author’s own logic. And you’re incorrect: Prop 8 was implemented. A federal district court enjoined Prop. 8, but that order was itself stayed by the 9th circuit. Marriage licenses were not issued from 2009-2013. The Supreme Court dismissed the challenge to the injunction in 2013 on procedural grounds, and marriage licenses resumed. By then the writing was already on the wall with the Supreme Court’s decision in Windsor.
The premise of the article isn’t which urban areas “support” for LGBT rights goes the deepest. It’s looking at states which enacted legislation that might give LGBT people a reason to not want to live there. A large number of states banned same sex marriage in their constitutions between 2000-2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_constitutional_amen.... It’s notable that California was one of those states. Minnesota and Iowa and Indiana didn’t. Neither did West Virginia, Pennsylvania, etc., along with most of the northeast and Maryland and Delaware. These is something to be said for the culture of places that may not be “progressive” but unlike California were tolerant enough to not have jumped on that constitutional amendment bandwagon.