In all the conversation around Barack Obama’s announcement that he now supports same-sex marriage, one thing is often forgotten: just how quickly public opinion is shifting on this issue.

It’s often been reported, for instance, that black Americans oppose same-sex marriage by a 49-39 margin. What’s less often mentioned is that that figure, from April of this year, represents a 27-point tightening from 2008, when 63% of blacks opposed same-sex marriage, and only 26% supported it. At that rate of change, same-sex marriage will reach plurality support late next year and majority support sometime in 2015. To put it another way, black views on same-sex marriage today are exactly where whites’ positions stood just four years ago.

And if you look at charts of public opinion on the issue, it’s clear that views aren’t just changing quickly, the rate of change is accelerating. We’ve reached a tipping point on the question, and we may reach something approaching consensus far sooner than we think.

Don’t believe me? Check this out:

More Americans support same-sex marriage today than supported marriage between blacks and whites in 1994.

That’s right. Same-sex marriage is more popular in the United States in 2012 than interracial marriage was just eighteen years ago. And as with same-sex marriage, polling results on interracial marriage show a long period of slow change followed by a dramatic, rapid shift.

In 1968, only 20% of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Support grew at a rate of about one point a year over the next quarter century, and actually slowed in the eighties and early nineties. But then the dam broke, and support shot up 38 points in the next 18 years. Today, support for interracial marriage stands well above 90% for all but the oldest Americans.

Students in the Canadian province of Quebec have overwhelmingly rejected the government’s proposal to end their three-month strike.

Amid concerns that the offer did little to keep tuition rates down and claims by student negotiators that the government altered the plan without their consent, students at campus after campus have rejected the deal, leaving the provincial government and the student unions back at square one and putting the spring semester in peril.

Anti-strike students at one college obtained a court injunction on Wednesday calling on their school to re-open, but when they arrived this morning to enforce the ruling, the campus entrance had been barricaded by a group of some two hundred students and professors. Administrators attempted to negotiate with the protesters, but announced after an hour of discussion that the campus would remain closed.

Yesterday morning the entire Montreal subway system was shut down for an hour and a half after smoke bombs were set off in at least five stations. No person or group took credit for the shutdown, and speculation mounted during the day as to whether it was connected to the student strike.

University of California administrators have been moving on several different fronts this week to end the occupation of the Gill Tract, a 15-acre experimental farm not far from the UC Berkeley campus.

Activists have been occupying the farm since April 22. As one occupation organizer puts it,

The University of California’s public mission as a Land Grant institution is to promote community involvement and initiatives in agriculture. Nonetheless, institutional attempts to ensure the university fulfills this promise have not been successful. It is only with the recent land occupation that the University has proposed to hold a series of workshops to explore the possibilities for “metropolitan agricultural initiatives” on the Gill Tract.

But the university has refused to move forward with those initiatives until the occupiers leave the land, and over the last few days they’ve been ratcheting up the pressure. On Wednesday the UC Board of Regents filed suit against the group, looking for a restraining order and injunction against the occupation. They also put up concrete barricades to block vehicular traffic from the site.

Yesterday the university went further, closing and locking both of the farm’s gates. So far, police have not attempted to prevent occupiers from climbing over fences to get in and out of the site. Organizers feared that a police raid was imminent last night, but so far none has materialized.

The occupiers’ website is at takebackthetract.com. Twitter updates can be found at #occupythefarm.

Mitt Romney has a problem.

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that in 1965, when he was a high school senior, Romney organized a group of his fellow students in a physical assault on a gay classmate, John Lauber. When Lauber, who was closeted at the time, appeared on campus one spring wearing his hair longer than usual, and dyed blond, Romney reportedly put together a posse who grabbed him and held him down, screaming and crying, while Romney cut his hair with a pair of scissors.

Four of Romney’s classmates confirmed the story to the Post, including one who says he participated in the assault.

Of course, 1965 was a long time ago, and few of us would want to be judged on the basis of our worst moments in high school. But this was a physical assault, an act of bullying that participants and witnesses remember as “senseless” and “vicious.” In the era of Tyler Clementi and “it gets better,” it’s an incident that demands a response.

There are three ways to address a story like this. The first, obviously, is to deny it, which Romney doesn’t do. He says he doesn’t remember it, but doesn’t dispute that it happened. That leaves two choices: acknowledge that the incident was serious and express real remorse, or dismiss it as insignificant.

You can’t do both. If the attack was wrong, you can’t brush it aside. Non-conforming kids are still getting brutalized today, and you can’t stand up against that kind of bullying if you don’t take it seriously in your own past. Conversely, any defense that rests on a claim that the story isn’t important because Romney has evolved as a person since high school has to be accompanied by some indication of what that evolution has entailed.

So far, Romney has tried to blow the story off. He’s offered a variety of conditional, vague apologies, but ducked a reporter who asked him whether he’d characterize the incident as one of bullying, and giggled his way through the first interview in which the issue came up. He’s going through the motions of expressing contrition, but making it clear that he’s eager to move on to more serious issues.

And his supporters are following his lead. Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review has dismissed the story as “silly” and “trivial.” A Breitbart columnist has gone so far as to suggest that Romney was merely enforcing the school’s dress code.

I don’t think this approach is going to fly. Teen violence is a recognized problem in this country, and Romney’s equivocation gives comfort to its apologists. On the National Review website, one commenter declared that “we all have such episodes in our past,” while another suggested that the story “makes it sound like he was a normal red-blooded American male teenager and makes him more likable.” As long as Romney continues to minimize his actions, he’s effectively endorsing these defenses and normalizing his behavior.