Those that support Gay marriage must answer the following question: From the point of view of public policy, is it wise to encourage a life style that is barren at a time when the fertility rate of the United States is below replacement and falling, and when that lifestyle is associated with a life expectancy one to two decades below a straight lifestyle?

Which means that putting lots of effort into changing de jure isn’t going to gain the effect you want.

And honestly Steven, with all due respect, I submit that gay Americans—as Americans—are already on our team. And they’re being treated very shabbily, not merely in a de facto way, but de jure.

yours/
peter.

And the reason it happened is that the majority of Americans agreed that it was right to do so.

Dr. King’s campaign of civil disobedience in the South in the 1960′s is a classic. Part of why he was successful is that he always, always, understood that he could only gain victory by convincing the majority of white Americans that his cause was just.

Dr. King didn’t go to court. Dr. King appealed to the “court of public opinion” because he knew that was the only one which ultimately mattered. If Whites were against him, it didn’t matter what courts said.

Brown v Board of Education is proof of that. It didn’t end apartheid. It didn’t even end segregated schools. All it did was make a lot of people mad.

Apartheid in America ended when, and only when, the majority of Americans agreed that it should. Gay marriage will only happen with the majority of Americans agree that it should. The courts can’t change that, and the courts shouldn’t try.

It doesn’t matter whether this is how it should be. I myself think gay marriage should be legal. But I also think it should become legal when we who advocate it have convinced the majority of our fellow citizens of that, because there’s no other way to make it real, and permanent, and accepted.

On a deep level, democracy is more than just holding elections. Democracy is a contract the people have with each other, and an agreement that they’re all in it together. If one subgroup decides to shut out all the others…

…the others will respond by shutting out that subgroup. And they’ll be right to do so. And that’s what we’re seeing: backlash against gay marriage in the form of state constitutional amendments banning it.

If y’all want to be part of our team, you have to play by our rules.

It wasn’t Supreme Court decisions that brought about the Civil Rights victories of the 1960′s. It wasn’t even passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was the end result of decades of work by activists who recognized that in the end the only way they could win was by convincing the majority of Americans. So they worked away, and eventually they did so.

The courts, and even Congress, cannot force the American people to act in certain ways if the people strongly oppose doing so. As a practical matter, rights only exists because we recognize them and are willing to defend them. “We” means the American people collectively.

The courts can only give you a fragile, temporary, and partial victory. You can only win in the long run if you convince the majority of your fellow citizens that you’re right.

So why not start now?

The way I see it, the courts are a legitimate avenue for minorities to seek justice when the will of the majority is the exact opposite of justice, and are a more immediate way to access justice. Their function in our system, to me, embodies the understanding that might (in this case, might in numbers) does not always make right.

Change that function into one of essentially rubber-stamping majority opinion, and we shut off an avenue for minorities to seek justice and more immediate relief from injustice. We inch closer to absolute majority rule, in which there really aren’t any unalienable rights, if the majority decides that’s how it should be.

And, we ask people who are experiencing injustice to simply live with it longer, rather than have the courts as a means of accessing rights and protections they and their families don’t currently have.

I understand that while a court can mandate how people treat you, it cannot change their hearts on the question of your humanity. It cannot change what people believe. In the case of gay people, that comes from more of us coming out in our communities and families.

It’s a much longer process, from there to legislative victory. That doesn’t make it less important. So, I think we need both legislative and judicial strategies, because our families need these rights and protections now, and because the longer process of changing minds is as necessary as immediate relief from injustice.

You’re arguing about what the decision should be, and ignoring the fact that none of you are going to be permitted to participate in making that decision.

In the United States there are a lot of decisions in which we’re not allowed to participate. For instance, we’re not allowed to vote on whether we’d like black people to become the property of white people, or whether gay people have the right to own property. Technically this is because these decisions have already been made, decided when the 1st Amendment guarantee to freedom of association was ratified and when the 14th Amendment’s guarantee to equality before the law was ratified.

Protecting the individual rights of minorities from the whims of the majority is part of the American social compact too. And as a Jacksonian (classical) liberal capitalist who agrees with your positions on virtually everything except perhaps this, I see this arrangment as a feature, not a bug.

yours/
peter.

You’re arguing about what the decision should be, and ignoring the fact that none of you are going to be permitted to participate in making that decision.

Even if we disagree on whether gay marriage should be legal, don’t we all agree that we’d like to be consulted on the issue instead of having the decision made by a handful of judges?

Uh… how is it “not so”? For any value of “I”, I’m not allowed to have more than one spouse. I’m also not allowed to have a spouse of the same sex as I am. Both prohibitions apply equally to everyone. There are good arguments out there for gay marriage; what you posted is NOT one of them.

Regardless… the point is, this is an issue that should be decided by the people, in a manner that takes into account everyone’s concerns. It’s not an issue that the courts should settle by inventing laws that don’t truly exist.

Brief version: n order to get polygamy, you have to give up liberal democracy. That is too high a cost.

I read the link, and I think this is pretty overwraught. Post-agricultural economies will probably discourage polygamy for most of us the same way it disourages producing too many children. While two-person marriages tend to produce efficiency, the law of diminshing returns is in effect. At some point the number of spouses will prove uneconomical.

Anyway, more to the point, there is a big difference between the issues of gay marriage and polygamy: the prohibition on polygamy applies to everyone, and thus we all remain equal under that law. Not so in the case gay marriage.

Regarding unforseen circumstances, I fully accept that there may be some unintended consequences to getting government out of the marriage business. Still, this isn’t to say that all of these consequences will be undesirable. Nor is it the same as sayiing that it’s likely we will all rue the day we legalize gay marriage.

Regarding incestuous marriage, I disagree in classifying it as a can of worms, but it is definitely a worm, and a slippery one at that.

yours/
peter.

You are referring, I take it, to the suburban Democrat every Chicagoan knows about who stated in her will that she be was to buried in the city so that she could continue to support the party.

Given that homosexual relationships cannot produce both parties’ genetic children, there is no longer ANY reason for barring adult consensual incestuous marriages; under the (completely unwarranted) strict scrutiny used by the NJ Kangaroo Court, the prohibition on incestuous marriage is no longer narrowly tailored, because it includes a class to which its rationale is inapplicable.

Wow, how did all these worms get out of that can?

Gary Becker — the case for polygamy. Why are consenting adults not legally allowed to form a union when they want to be in a man woman woman … (or woman man man …) union?

And here is the case against polygamy. Brief version: n order to get polygamy, you have to give up liberal democracy. That is too high a cost.

When it comes to the organizing of society, I have but one simple rule: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Hear hear. All you have to do is switch the civil right in question to see how silly this argument is:

Why, if we give women the right to vote, the next thing you children will want the right to vote too! And—animals! Animals will want the vote! And then corpses! And dining room furniture…

yours/
peter.

I think this is an attempt to construct a straw man. The idea here isn’t how two people who enter into a contract are defined, the point is whether or not they are eligible to make such a contract in the first place.

That is the position of those who oppose gay marriage: that it is a union where people who are of the same sex are ineligible.

But I believe today that understanding manifests itself as a religious preference, attested to by the fact that the opponents of gay marriage are almost exclusively religious opponents.

I would agree with you if there wasn’t a very clear financial advantage to being married, from taxes to insurance benefits to inheritance. Claiming that it is a religious matter merely because you perceive opponents to such a union as being “almost exclusively religious opponents” is not reasonable.

I am not concerned about gay marriage, and would support it if it came up on the ballot. But I am increasingly wary of the rhetoric employed by those who actively campaign for the measure. Marraige is hardly a right as I understand the term, no matter how many times gay marriage proponents insist that it is.

I also note that a fair number of the people who oppose such unions voice concerns for the unintended impact on society, the author of this post being one of them. Conflating these concerns with religious bigotry not only ignores valid objections, but it also seems to be a deliberate attempt to smear your opponents.

James

Here is the link.

Gay marriage advocates cannot simply argue that the marriage = man+woman is now simply a “religious preference today” despite thousands of years of settled precedent, and THEN argue that NAMBLA is different AND WILL CREDIBLY REMAIN that way in the future.

They are different only because elite sensibilities about them are different.

The majority does not think that polygamy is any farther from traditional marriage than gay marriage.

The Social Left (including libertarians) may wish to try to persuade people that is not so. But this sort of legislation by judicial fiat is a good example of why the average American is so scornful of elite sophistry.

Rightly so. The average man in the street who is not very good at verbal sleight of hand, knows in his gut when he is being bamboozled. He may not be able to write scintillating articles in the NY Times about it, but he can vote. And if even that fails, do not be surprised as support for our current system of democracy slowly erodes.