Mark Smith has offered some excellent political and constitutional analysis of the same sex marriage debate before the Supreme Court (see here and here).  But one of the most often heard arguments in favor of same sex marriage is its inevitability.  As reported in NPR by Republican strategist (and same sex marriage supporter Ana Navarro):

“If we are to build a big-tent party, and we are to start winning elections, what we have to stop being is exclusive,” says Ana Navarro, a veteran Republican strategist who supports same-sex marriage. “We have to stop telling Republicans that they don’t pass a litmus test because we may disagree on one or two or three issues. We have to have much more diversity of thought and much more tolerance within the Republican Party.”

Navarro says the Republican Party simply cannot close its eyes to an inevitable shift.

“At some point, it’s going to be an irrelevant question, because it’s going to happen whether we like it or not,” she says.

The basic idea is same sex marriage is going to happen anyway, so let’s just avoid the negative politics on that and move on to other “more important” issues.  So is same sex marriage inevitable?  Well, of course it is, IF you believe current public opinion trends are inexorable and must continue.  Most Americans do simply extrapolate out whatever data they are thinking about and assume continuation of the same.  Yet I’m not sure that is either good secular or biblical thinking.  History is replete with inevitable waves crashing on the beach with no effect.  The social milieu in the 1920s and 1930s would have suggested the inevitability of socialism.  Nakita Kruschev was going to bury us.  Peak oil would have suggested the end of carbon fuel just a few years ago and now we are almost Saudi America.  And everyone knew (because we were told by AlGore) that we were going to be much hotter today than we are (Global temps stopped rising in 1998, see pic insert).  So many things that we “know” to be inevitable simply don’t happen.  And for those that believe in a sovereign God who actively is involved in charting human history, suggesting a particular thing is inevitable seems naive at best.

If you are for same sex marriage you had better not rely on its being inevitable.  Likewise, if you are against same sex marriage, there is no reason to be discouraged.  Things only become inevitable when good people stop fighting for what they believe in.