I think at the heart of the gay marriage debate is the idea that the judiciary exists to, in part, right legislative wrongs. Since the courts' job is to interpret the law against our constitution, many gay marriage supporters seem to have this idea that it's fine for them to sort of declare law when the legislative process gets it wrong.
The problem is, this is an egregious misuse of the U.S. legal system and undemocratically creates policy with no regard for checks and balances.
It's interesting that polling institutions and the media continue to conduct polls on gay marriage. We're way past a mere question of approval or disagreement. Well over half the country has amended their state constitutions to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Another third of the country has statutes that affirm the same thing. If gay marriage advocates get their way, and the Supreme Court finds a right to same-sex marriage, they would invalidate all these laws in one sweeping motion.
To give you some scope of how big that would be, I'll just say it's virtually unprecedented for the Supreme Court to invalidate the expressed will in 2/3 of the states. There is no parallel to it. None. It took a Civil War, three constitutional amendments, several landmark pieces of legislation and court decisions just to undo slavery and its vestiges. And this was over a group of people who, up until the mid-60s, had come from having few rights and no representation.
Compare that to the gay community who considers their struggles to be on par with that of blacks and it just doesn't add up.
My argument isn't that gays aren't important enough to obtain marriage rights or that they're defective. Though I'm personally against it, it's not because of personal feelings about the gay community and just not being convinced by their arguments nor their tactics in obtaining them. Rallying, petitioning their representatives, going on TV and radio campaigning for it is fine; legal bullying and trumping up erroneous lawsuits to overturn the expressed will of millions of voters (as the Prop 8 case illustrates) is wrong.
It's not so much that I think there's a perfect reason against it; I just think there's no compelling reason for it, and more importantly, there's no compelling argument that requires it.
That's the point. The people have the right to not engage in the gay marriage experiment if the potential outcome bothers them. Marriage has had many social functions across time and different cultures, but to my knowledge it has never been to create a distinctly separate class of person, especially regarding sexual proclivities.
I know some people believe that since there's an established "right to marry" -- and the obvious context being between a man and a woman, not some general definition that doesn't take the spouses into account -- gay marriage is just as much a right as, well, anything else. But it's truly not. No matter how supportive you are of the LGBT community, and how tolerant you want to be, you can't jeopardize people's freedom to decide which policies they want to enact in a free society for the mere notion of tolerance.
The problem is, this is an egregious misuse of the U.S. legal system and undemocratically creates policy with no regard for checks and balances.
It's interesting that polling institutions and the media continue to conduct polls on gay marriage. We're way past a mere question of approval or disagreement. Well over half the country has amended their state constitutions to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Another third of the country has statutes that affirm the same thing. If gay marriage advocates get their way, and the Supreme Court finds a right to same-sex marriage, they would invalidate all these laws in one sweeping motion.
To give you some scope of how big that would be, I'll just say it's virtually unprecedented for the Supreme Court to invalidate the expressed will in 2/3 of the states. There is no parallel to it. None. It took a Civil War, three constitutional amendments, several landmark pieces of legislation and court decisions just to undo slavery and its vestiges. And this was over a group of people who, up until the mid-60s, had come from having few rights and no representation.
Compare that to the gay community who considers their struggles to be on par with that of blacks and it just doesn't add up.
My argument isn't that gays aren't important enough to obtain marriage rights or that they're defective. Though I'm personally against it, it's not because of personal feelings about the gay community and just not being convinced by their arguments nor their tactics in obtaining them. Rallying, petitioning their representatives, going on TV and radio campaigning for it is fine; legal bullying and trumping up erroneous lawsuits to overturn the expressed will of millions of voters (as the Prop 8 case illustrates) is wrong.
It's not so much that I think there's a perfect reason against it; I just think there's no compelling reason for it, and more importantly, there's no compelling argument that requires it.
That's the point. The people have the right to not engage in the gay marriage experiment if the potential outcome bothers them. Marriage has had many social functions across time and different cultures, but to my knowledge it has never been to create a distinctly separate class of person, especially regarding sexual proclivities.
I know some people believe that since there's an established "right to marry" -- and the obvious context being between a man and a woman, not some general definition that doesn't take the spouses into account -- gay marriage is just as much a right as, well, anything else. But it's truly not. No matter how supportive you are of the LGBT community, and how tolerant you want to be, you can't jeopardize people's freedom to decide which policies they want to enact in a free society for the mere notion of tolerance.