The first same-sex marriages took place in the UK over the weekend.  Brendan O’Neill, the editor of the online magazine, Spiked, has an article today asking a very pertinent question: how did support for gay marriage become the conventional wisdom so quickly?

It hasn’t been all that long since same-sex marriage was barely thought of or proposed by anyone, (it was even a minority position among LGBT activists). But now it has become an absolute article of faith for anyone who wants to be called a ‘liberal’. 

The merits or de-merits of the issue aside, it is extremely unusual for a social change as significant as the redefinition of marriage to transform from the viewpoint of a very small minority to modern-day orthodoxy in less than a decade.

O’Neill quotes the American journalist, Chris Caldwell, to good effect on this point: ‘Public opinion does not change this fast in free societies. Either opinion is not changing as fast as it appears to be, or society is not as free.’

A society is clearly not as free as it thinks when public opinion is so quickly corralled into a particular point of view as it has been on this issues with dissenting voices marginalised through constant demonisation.

O’Neill believes that society has been pressured into conformity.

Read the whole thing here.