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army1987 comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong
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Hold on there. That doesn't follow. It is possible to do the same thing either for rational or irrational reasons.
Nobody who was an adult in 1901 is alive today, but for people who changed their mind and were adults many decades ago, I'd suggest that either
the influence of religion on them went down, so they were susceptible to a rational argument recently, but no rational argument could have convinced them in the earlier time period, or
they changed their mind about the issue for a reason that was not rational (such as their preacher telling them that God says gay marriage is okay)
"many decades ago" was long enough after 1901 that there wasn't as much religious influence on them in the first place, so they were susceptible to rational argument, but only because they were not from 1901
What would it even mean for support or opposition to gay marriage to be rational or irrational? The utility function isn't up for grabs.
It would be an odd utility function which had an explicit term for gay marriage specifically. Arguments for it tend to be based on broader principles, like fairness and the fact of its non-harmfulness to others.
An irrational opposition might be something like having a term for fairness but failing to evaluate that term in some particular case, or becoming convinced of harmfulness despite the absence of evidence for such.