popularly approved

This from yesterday:

Amid a pep-rally atmosphere, Massachusetts legislators on Wednesday overwhelmingly rejected an attempt to halt same-sex marriages here -- showing how quickly gay nuptials have moved from being a court-ordered imposition to a powerful political cause.
By a vote of 157 to 39, members of the House and the Senate meeting together voted down a proposed constitutional amendment that would have eliminated the same-sex marriages legalized two years ago and replaced them with "civil unions" for gay couples.
. . .
Politicians here credit the weddings themselves with shifting the political momentum, saying their growing ordinariness has defused some of the opposition.
. . .
The proposal passed in March 2004 but still required another vote; it was the measure turned down on Wednesday.
In the meantime, the weddings began. Since the first one on May 17, 2004, more than 6,100 gay couples have wed, accounting for about 17 percent of all the state's weddings during that period.
Each one made the idea of same-sex marriage more acceptable, observers say.

A principal argument among opponents of gay marriage in Massachusetts was that it was judicially imposed and didn't reflect the will of the people. That argument lays by the wayside in Massachusetts and California.

Kevin Drum remarks:

This is the beginning of the end for gay marriage opponents. As gay marriage becomes more common — both in the United States and in other countries — and absolutely nothing happens except that more people than ever can show off wedding scrapbooks with pictures of beaming partners and guests having a blast, opposition will slowly but surely melt away. The homophobes are banking everything on the proposition that same-sex marriage will lead to moral degeneracy and the breakdown of society, and when that doesn't happen they'll have nothing left.

Our society survived interracial marriage, against all predictions to the contrary, and became stronger because of it. The same will be true of gay marriage.