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Many in Texas would do both of those. It may be legal but that does not mean it will be common or that gays who choose to marry will be treated with dignity. It is still going to be tough to be gay outside Austin.
The cities of Houston and Dallas are every bit of gay accepting as Austin. This rainbow patina that everyone puts on Austin is not accurate. Houston has a gay mayor and Dallas has had gay city councilman and lesbian sheriff.
This illustrates just how completely detached from reality you are.
The Federal Marriage Amendment has never gotten more than 236 votes in the House of Representatives (a 2/3rds supermajority, or 290, is required for the proposed amendment to pass the House).
As for the Senate, the last time the issue came up the GOP couldn't get more than 48 votes to invoke cloture and bring the proposal to a vote. What planet do you live on where you think that now, eight years later when support for marriage equality is far greater, it could ever muster the required 67 votes? To put it another way, 55 sitting Senators support marriage equality. Even if you naively believe all the 45 who don't would want to enact a federal ban on it, that still leaves it 22 votes short. Are you so oblivious to reality that you think public sentiment (and thus, political sentiment) is suddenly going to do a 180-degree shift and go in the opposite direction? You apparently are.
Now, the states. You appear ignorant of the fact that proposed amendments require ratification by 3/4ths of all states - or, 38 of them. But there are far more than 13 states (the number needed to block ratification) that would never, ever, ratify such an amendment. Here's 18, and this is only a partial list:
CA
CT
DE
HI
IL
MA
MD
ME
MN
NH
NJ
NM
NV
NY
OR
RI
VT
WA
So, to sum up, a Constitutional Amendment requires three things for enactment: passing the House, passing the Senate, retification by the states. It has approximately zero chance of meeting any of those three requirements.
And you're completely oblivious to this.
As the SCOTUS made clear the federal government has nothing to do with marriage, that institution is the domain of the states. Therefore an amendment to the USC would have but limited value and cause more harm than good. Even at the height of slavery's popularity and or race feelings against blacks you never could or would get an amendment through Congress much less voted on by states making that thing legal and or making AAs "separate but equal". So how does anyone expect something like gay marriage to even stand a chance.
Regardless of various senators and House members personal feelings they simply are not going to go on record putting the United States in the same category as some African nations, or Russia, that is enshrine discrimination into statue. It just does not look good on the world stage to have the supposed superpower and leading nation of the free world act that way.
Quite honestly the problem is not *marriage* per se, but the various benefits on both federal and state level heaped upon that institution for various reasons. Many of those stem from out dated views of and roles in society regarding women.
In many other western nations the focus is on the family especially children. There you have vast benefits available to mothers, fathers, women and children regardless of marital status. The USA OTOH still clings to this notion that if you support marriage such benefits will flow that way. This despite marriage rates in the USA have been declining for years and >50% of all marriages do not last past eleven years. The only demographic showing any increase and or stability in marriage rates are white/European upper middle and wealthy classes. For most everyone else including minorities the rates are much worse.
The federal tax code upon which many state's base their own pushes marriage via "joint returns" and causes all sorts of distortions to solve the marriage penalty. In other countries such as Canada (where gay marriage is legal nationwide), the concept of joint tax returns does not exist. Men and women keep the names they were born with after marriage even for social security purposes and pay taxes under that name separately all their lives. Such places that go this route often have another schedule or form for "family" (which can be a very expansive meaning of such a household), where various deductions, credits and so forth are applied.
And so it goes.. There is no mandate that the federal government offer the one thousand and so benefits of marriage gays claim they are denied by states not allowing same sex marriage. Indeed if those benefits did not exist much of the fire to strike down state's laws against SSM would vanish. Windsor vs. DOMA was about treatment of a surviving spouse's taxes by the IRS. This list goes on and on, everything from immigration to Social Security.
As the SCOTUS made clear the federal government has nothing to do with marriage, that institution is the domain of the states. Therefore an amendment to the USC would have but limited value and cause more harm than good. Even at the height of slavery's popularity and or race feelings against blacks you never could or would get an amendment through Congress much less voted on by states making that thing legal and or making AAs "separate but equal". So how does anyone expect something like gay marriage to even stand a chance.
Bit off topic but I wonder if we had a gay male president married to another man would his partner be a First Lady I wonder , or first ....something talk about a screw up if that ever happens and I'm sure it will at some point.
He would be First Man or First Gentleman. Same as if we have a female president.
I think guns is the next frontier. Gun control is a matter of time. Again, public opinion (overall) is clearly on the side of very limited control at the moment. That won't last. Anti-gun forces will gradually shift public opinion just as was done with gay marriage. The second amendment will be reinterpreted.
I don't see this happening. Public opinion on guns has not changed - even with several spectacular mass shootings.
Gun control has never produced measurable benefits in reducing violent crime. I think most Americans can digest that.
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talk about a screw up if that ever happens and I'm sure it will at some point.