Notes on marriage equality

Dear pals,

A close, but somewhat blog-shy friend sent me an email commenting on my last post. Since s/he is such a wicked smart person, I wanted to share his/her comments with you all. Here, then, without editorial comment, is the note [Hope that's okay blog-shy pal!]:

Gay marriage is something that I have a hard time with--not because I'm agin it, but because I think its advocates are making lots of mistakes that play into the hands of their opponents.

First, let's not pretend, as I heard some people say in the California debates, that this is such a fundamental right that it may not be subject to the political process. In the world of fundamental rights, it's an extremely recent discovery, and I think it's unreasonable to expect people to accept it as such simply because some Supreme Court or another said so. As with Roe v. Wade, it is a political mistake, as well as something that's extremely damaging to our political and social fabric, for an unelected council of "wise men" to yank a contentious issue out of politics when the nation as a whole isn't anywhere near a consensus. Lead, certainly--but not by so much that the bulk of the people can't even see you.

It was absolutely critical, in the case of gay marriage in Massachusetts, that the otherwise spineless, corrupt, and generally contemptible legislature finally came up with the intestinal fortitude to vote on a petition to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage (after the SJC had made it a right)--various of the legislative "leaders" were trying all kinds of shenanigans to let the petition die without a vote, in clear violation of the state constitution's clauses dealing with amendments. Because they voted, even though the amendment didn't get enough votes from the legislature to be put on the ballot (and therefore died), the opponents of gay marriage could no longer argue that they'd been shut out of the process.

I don't think the opponents of gay marriage generally have good, solid, well-reasoned arguments to use--there aren't any. But. Tradition, visceral reaction to change, visceral reaction to hearing that your cherished beliefs, learned at your mother's knee, are primitive and irrational, visceral reaction to hearing that you have nowhere in politics to express those beliefs... You have to deal with those things, too. Time will work. Patience will work. Bullying, not so much. Judicial decrees, in this context, count as bullying. Let the legislatures with the stones to address the issue do so, and eventually the rest of the country will be too embarrassed not to follow.