> California, by contrast, reacted to an identical court ruling in 2008 by banning same-sex marriage until all such laws were overturned in 2015.

This is a cherry-picked example and a bad-faith argument.

You're trying to portray the CA Prop 8 battle as demonstrating that CA was/is regressive. It does not show that. It's more accurate to say that there was a national debate going on at the time, and the open-ness of the CA initiative process allowed it to play out here for a brief period of time. Prop 8 was immediately challenged and was never implemented.

I don't like arguing with bad-faith actors, so I won't go further than saying you're taking all context away from this to get to a conclusion you want.

> Folks in California might be surprised about what the rest of the country is really like.

I visit the urban midwest frequently, and it's simply not as socially progressive as urban California is. There are progressive pockets! There are progressive and kind people! (And in CA, there are socially regressive places.)

But the support for LGBTQ rights in urban CA goes much, much deeper than it does in Midwest cities. Arguing the point is laughable, ridiculous, and out of touch. Come on, we're talking San Francisco and West Hollywood here!

> 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.

I think you're myopically focused on a certain reading, so as mentioned, won't engage further.

How do you go from one obstinate commenter chanting "I'm not owned" to the whole left?

The point that you started out arguing was based on policy, though. Support in San Francisco and West Hollywood does go much, much deeper than it does in Midwest cities -- and much, much deeper than in most cities in California.

Point well taken.