South Africa legalizes gay marriage

South Africa's Constitutional Court has ruled that banning gay marriage violates South Africa's constitution, which bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Parliament has one year to change the law before the ruling goes into effect automatically.

What's fascinating to my mind is that this is apparently a complete non-issue politically. According to the NY Times,

But homosexuality here is not the sort of burning social issue that it is on the American political right. ... "It's not one of our political fault lines," said Steven E. Friedman, a top political analyst at Johannesburg's Center for Political Studies, a nonprofit research center. "The major issue in this society is race. That's why people join political parties. The party of social conservatism is the African Christian Democratic Party, which wins 1 percent of the vote. And that's the group of people who feel that this justifies amending the constitution."

I know very little about South Africa - can anyone out there explain why this is so, especially given that the lack of political mobilization against gay rights is apparently not accompanied by a similar societal tolerance for gay people (at least according to the Washington Post's article)?