According to the unnamed Republican pollster cited in this Ben Smith piece in Politico, "it's only a matter of time" before opposition to same sex marriage literally dies down, and it becomes the law of the land.

That's because different age cohorts skew differently on the question -- opposition to same sex marriage, pollsters agree, is primarily found in the older age groups, while younger voters are much less offended by the proposition, and are, therefore, much more supportive. Consequently, they believe, as older voters eventually pass on to their final reward, and are replaced in the electorate by younger voters who are more tolerant of same sex marriage, the pro-same sex marriage side of the balance sheet will eventually reach a tipping point, and same sex marriage will become law all over the land.

There's just one problem with this analysis, of course -- it assumes that people never change their thinking on matters of public policy -- that, in other words, once a same sex marriage supporter, always a same sex marriage supporter.

And I'm not at all sure that's the case.

Today is the 78th birthday of Edwin Meese III, the nation's 75th attorney general and a former counselor to President Ronald Reagan.

Meese entered public service as a law clerk in the district attorney's office in Alameda County, Calif., in 1958, and joined Gov. Reagan's staff in 1967. For the next 21 years -- in other words, through the entirety of Reagan's two terms as governor of California and two terms as president -- he devoted his life to helping Reagan.

Through the course of those tumultuous two decades, Meese was at Reagan's side at critical points -- advising Gov. Reagan on how to handle student protesters at Berkeley, ousting John Sears as Reagan's campaign manager in the 1980 campaign shakeup that saved Reagan's campaign, becoming one-third of the "Troika" (with James A. Baker and Michael K. Deaver) that guided Reagan's first term as president, and then serving as attorney general during Reagan's second term.

He was one of the few inner circle senior advisers to Reagan who shared his boss's ideological conservatism, and he could always be counted on to play the role of honest broker and make sure Reagan had considered all sides of a question before coming to a decision.

Should the United States seek the death penalty for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other four terrorists involved in carrying out the 9/11 attacks?

Attorney General Eric Holder says he will seek the death penalty as "an indication, I think, of how serious I view these cases, how negative the consequences of their actions were and how they must face the ultimate justice."

I am a strong proponent of the death penalty. To those who question its effectiveness as a deterrent, I remind them of the case of one William Horton, who, because he was not executed following his conviction for the first-degree murder of 17-year-old Joey Fournier, was alive to decide not to go back to the penitentiary in Massachusetts after a weekend furlough, and instead abscond to Maryland, where he committed heinous crimes against Cliff and Angie Barnes, for which, upon his conviction in Maryland, his sentencing judge declared that, contrary to the treatment of convicted murderers in Massachusetts, Horton would only leave the Maryland penitentiary "in a pine box."