Panelists Analyze The State Of Gay Marriage Debate

George Will, a conservative panelist on ABC News This Week, made striking remarks about the nation's increasing support for same-sex marriages on Sunday (Dec. 9), leaving one select group responsible for the remaining opposition: the elderly.

"There is something like an emerging consensus," he said. "Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying. It’s old people."

This discussion was fueled by the Supreme Court's decision on Friday (Dec. 7) to pick up two prominent cases on gay marriage. One will challenge a provision in the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, while the other will come against Proposition 8, which prohibited same-sex couples from marriage in California.

For many political analysts, this is a pivotal time in the nation's discussion on the hot-button topic, with election results at the helm. Will credited the support of same-sex marriage from Maine, Maryland and Washington on Election Day as a tell-tale factor of where public opinion is headed, and said that this will also be a defining moment for the Supreme Court. According to the panelist, the Supreme Court's decision could either encourage or endanger the reshaping of public opinion.

"They don’t want to do what they did with abortion," he said. "The court yanked the subject out of democratic discourse and embittered the argument."

A recent poll on political news site Politico supports Will's claim that the senior population are the last dissenters of gay marriage. It showed that 63 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 supported gay marriage while only 3 in 10 seniors were in favor.

Also on the panel was Republican strategist Mara Matalin, who took the finger-pointing even further by naming the real culprit in American marriage culture.

"People who live in the real world say the greatest threat to civil order is heterosexuals who don’t get married and are making babies,” Matalin said.

"[..] People who live in the real world say the greatest threat to civil order is heterosexuals who don’t get married and are making babies,” she said. “That’s an epidemic in crisis proportions. That is irrefutably more problematic for our culture than homosexuals getting married.”