Winning By Not Losing

Gay marriage supporters in Indiana scored what amounts to a victory by preventing a constitutional amendment to the state Constitution banning gay marriage:

Opponents of an effort to place Indiana's gay marriage ban in the state constitution won a surprising victory Thursday as the Senate effectively pushed off a statewide vote on the issue for at least two years, and possibly longer.
The Indiana Senate considered no amendments and did not debate before advancing the proposed ban without a provision that would have barred civil unions and could have prevented employers from offering benefits to same-sex couples. The expansive language had raised concerns among many lawmakers, including those who otherwise supported limiting marriage to being between one man and one woman.
The House stripped that language from the amendment before passing it last month, and the Senate's decision not to restore the language before voting Thursday means the effort to amend the constitution must start fresh.
Indiana requires constitutional amendments to be approved in the same form in two consecutive biennial meetings of the General Assembly. The ban with the civil unions language first passed in 2011 and had seemed a slam dunk this year in the Republican-controlled Legislature. That would have set up a statewide vote in November.
But opponents began organizing early last year and lined up powerful names in the state's business and higher education communities to support their arguments.

The delay makes it much more likely that public opinion or legal ruling will swing in favor of gay marriage, and Indiana's statute banning gay marriage will be overturned.  Lest you think conservatives will soon give up on using homophobia to rally the base, there's still Kansas looking to legalize the right of businesses to refuse provision of service on religious grounds to gay couples getting married, and Ted Cruz has decided to make upholding state gay marriage bans his latest eventual lost cause (I think we might be able to tell when the political winds have turned against an idea when Ted Cruz starts crusading for it).  In the Kansas case, I understand the general idea of where the folks are coming from, but what if a Quaker was refusing to serve members of the military on religious grounds?  How well would that go down?