E.J. Graff says that although anti-gay-marriage amendments will probably pass in all 11 states in which they’re on the ballot on Tuesday, not to worry: time is on our side.

Imagine coming upon this sentence for the first time, without having listened closely to any discussion of gay rights: “Marriage consists only of the union between one man and one woman.” Wouldn’t that strike you as a dictionary definition of marriage? That was exactly the intention of this brilliant and sneaky sentence’s framers, when the first Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), was loosed upon the nation in 1995. And it’s still the effect that the phrase has on most ordinary voters today. That particular version comes from the first sentence of the proposed Arkansas constitutional amendment; with a few tweaks, it’s what you’ll find on eleven state ballots next week. And it reads less like a ban than an affirmation, a simple declaration of fact. What voter wants to mess with Webster’s?

But, of course, Webster’s keeps issuing new editions–because words are continually changing to fit our changing lives. In the mid-nineteenth century, the comparable sentence would have been this: “Nothing is Marriage but a solemn engagement to live together in faith and love till death” (italics in the original). That was written by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who argued that marriage’s very definition–you could read it in the dictionary!–precluded divorce. In his mind, and in the minds of many at the time, divorce with remarriage was immoral bed-hopping, simple polygamy, since it enabled someone to have more than one living spouse at a time. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century public discussion over marriage’s exit rules was as heated as today’s debate over whether marriage’s entrance rules should be gender-neutral. But in that century-long debate, Americans concluded that Webster’s was wrong: The essence of marriage wasn’t in the phrase “till death,” but in the more central phrase, “a solemn engagement to live together in faith and love.” Not coincidentally, that’s also the definition under which same-sex couples belong. …

Same-sex marriage advocate Evan Wolfson, the founder and director of the national group Freedom to Marry, likes to say that about a third of the country already backs same-sex marriage and that about a third (roughly the percentage that identifies as evangelical Christian) is unalterably opposed. The remaining portion, the “movable middle,” has not thoroughly thought the issue through. Many such folks hold two opposing impulses at the same time, impulses they haven’t yet managed to reconcile. On the one hand, they have that deep American belief in the importance of equal rights for all. On the other hand, they think gay sex (and therefore gay marriage) is really, really icky. The Defense of Marriage Acts are written to appeal to one side of those conflicting beliefs, pushing the other out of the voters’ minds. And so, in most states, passing those dictionary-definition DOMA amendments takes little or no work; you just have to get one on the ballot.

Defeating a DOMA, however, requires a ferocious retail effort. It means talking, one on one, to a significant percentage of voters in a state. On the nation’s coasts and in the biggest cities, the places to which so many lesbians and gay men flee for protection and refuge, those conversations have indeed been happening. As a result, in states like Massachusetts or New Jersey, same-sex marriage has at least a plurality of supporters. But here’s where those conversations have not been happening, or at least, not in significant enough numbers: Arkansas, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, or Utah. …

Over the next five, ten, and twenty years, as lesbians and gay men keep leading ordinary lives in full view, those hastily passed DOMA amendments will be peeled right back off the books, one by one. Coastal states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, California, and Washington will keep moving toward more fully recognizing a life commitment between two women or two men. Many of those now-married couples and their kids will regularly head home to the interior for Thanksgiving, Passover, Christmas, Juneteenth, birthdays, high-school reunions, and so on for years to come. Eventually, their families and friends will agree that they, too, fit marriage’s meaning and deserve the recognition of civil law.

That shift will happen faster in states where marriage equality advocates have been hunkering down and educating their fellow citizens. It will take longer in states where, instead, lesbians and gay men have simply picked up and moved away. The shift won’t happen next Tuesday. It won’t happen next Wednesday. But–unlike the Red Sox–this team won’t keep me waiting for 86 years.