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Not too long ago, conventional wisdom seemed to hold that gay marriage was inevitable in America. Conservatives, actually, would tell me this more often than anyone else. But something has changed. Carrie Prejean has had an effect on us.

That’s the argument made by my friend Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage, in the latest issue of National Review.

After a series of judicial usurpations, legislative victories, and public-relations onslaughts, the gay-marriage movement suffered a setback this past November when Proposition 8 was passed in California. Voters affirmed a ballot measure that defined marriage as “between a man and a woman.” But the setback was widely perceived as temporary.

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The sea change just may have happened when a pretty, empathetic face came onto the national scene. A young competitor in a beauty contest was asked about her position on gay marriage, and she answered honestly (and, as it turns out, bravely): “I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman.” She added: “No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.”

The fact is that however you spin it, gay unions are not marriage. And as I write that, I am totally aware that heterosexual culture has not done what it should to protect marriage. But that we have fallen short — individually and collectively — is no reason to call the whole thing off and ditch a cornerstone of civilized society.

Gallagher writes: “Same-sex unions are really not just like opposite-sex unions when marriage is in question. Celebrating all forms of adult romantic love equally is not a very good justification for redefining a fundamental institution whose public purposes reach far beyond the affirmation of romance.”

The New York Times, just a day or so after Gallagher’s piece ran, confirmed that something has changed. In an article titled “Backers of Gay Marriage Rethink California Push,” the paper reported on how, discouraged by the political and cultural climate, many gay-marriage advocates are scaling back their efforts to overturn Proposition 8. This, despite the supposed inevitability of which some of my friends on the right were all but convinced, not so long ago.

And despite the shrill assertions of the Proposition 8 protesters, it’s not impossible to find members of the non-heterosexual community who have an ambivalent view of gay marriage.

After the recent release of a documentary about his life and career, fashion designer Valentino Garavani was asked if gay marriage should be legal. He answered: “For myself, all these years, I never thought about it in terms of changing the laws.” Speaking of his business partner and longtime companion Giancarlo Giammetti, he said, “Giammetti and I found our own way — nothing conventional — and it was always friendship first, always the most important thing: the friendship. I am neither for it legally, nor against it, so I have no personal agenda here.”

Not particularly political, this answer can’t be taken as outright opposition to gay marriage. But to these ears, there seems to be an acknowledgment of an inescapable truth: There is something transparently different between two men who decide to spend their lives together, and a marriage.

And unlike those strident advocates of gay marriage who spent the time during and after the Proposition 8 campaign in California intimidating and punishing those who supported the measure, most of us who oppose gay marriage are not looking to exclude anyone from any kind of happiness.

Carrie Prejean is now a face of that kind of tolerance. The contrast between her measured, mildly offered opinion and the angry, ugly Internet response from contest judge Perez Hilton, who had asked Prejean the fateful question, was striking. As Maggie Gallagher puts it, Hilton’s web video “reminded too many people of what they saw after Prop. 8.”

According to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, support for gay marriage has dropped nine percentage points from its historic high of 42 percent. According to Gallup, only 13 percent of Americans believe that gay marriage would make us better off, while 48 percent believe it would be a change for the worse.

While conservatives were tripping over themselves to pose with Log Cabin Republicans and join the march of inevitability, a beauty queen made it okay to confidently acknowledge reality, in a gentle and beautiful and even tolerant way.