I whined quite a bit last summer that it was too early, way too dangerously early to be plunging ahead into gay marriage. We had not sufficiently prepared the public, I had convinced myself.

Wrong, wrong, looks like I was dead wrong, as I have admitted here repeatedly since. But I really wasn't prepared for the big yawn out of Massacheusetts last month. No one seems to even be noticing.

I wonder how much it is the war. Quite a bit, I think. Nothing like a good national crisis to put priorities in place. Too much idle time on our hands can be a bad thing, right? Just gives all those straight people time to sit around fretting what gay marriage might do to them.

(Not to mention both discrediting the champions of the opposition, and forcing them to drop the stupid battle to take on something really imporant, like their appalling mismanagement of the war.)

And the one-two punch of a war on the heals of a troubled economy, all the better. The big question now is which will matter more in November--can the economy push the war back off center stage? I doubt it, personally, but either way, gay marriage just seem too trivial for most people to spend their time on today. Frank Rich in today's column:

But Massachusetts's wedding day proved to be the show dog that didn't bark. Americans merely shrugged, confirming polls both before and after that fateful day: voters rate same-sex marriage dead last in importance among issues in an election year dominated by a runaway real war.

(The column is hysterical, as usual, by the way, in a good way, of course.)

But I also think the San Francisco marriages helped. Get people used to it gradually. That just happened so suddenly, and as Joan Walsh wrote at the time, suddenly it seemed so inevitable: there's really no turning back after that. So those marriages may not end up standing up in the courts, but the couples have done their work for the rest of us. They pushed us all right past the what-if stage. What if men and men and women and women got married to each other, not just in their own private ceremonies, but legally, with bone fide marriage certificates issued by the actual government? Nothing, apparently. The sky didn't fall.

So when it happened again in Massacheusetts? What straight person was even going to be interested enough to watch that rerun. You can only get excited about it so many times. And the first time you see gay people kiss can be shocking--I still remember witnessing my first; I was still a straight guy, and I wasn't so much shocked as disgusted. But I got over it pretty fast. Even with all my internalized homophobia over my own situation simmering just under the surface.

Most straight people prolly weren't dialing up Nightline that night specifically to learn what was up with the homos, but if they happened to have the tube tuned to that channel they may well have sat there and watched. Or they can across the images elsewhere and will again in the future. No avoiding them, really.

Apparently I was just being a big chicken. Maybe the public was ready.

But it sure helps to have the war going on.