From a reader:

I would only disagree a little, and it’s more of a clarification…I think many gays may indeed ‘want’ the mile, even if given the ‘tangibles’ you mentioned. But the average gay person will probably not spend the energy mobilizing for protests, etc afterwards.
Once their basic financial and practical concerns (which many ‘anti-gay-marriage’ people find reasonable) are met, it becomes that much harder to mobilize public sympathy for the next step. They would begin to sound ‘whiny’ to most Americans.