Another Gay Marriage Post

I haven't blogged in a while, but I have been busy facebooking all about the debt ceiling. However with what just happened in New York on gay marriage, I stumbled upon Ross Douthat's latest on the subject.

I already blogged pretty heavily on Douthat's thoughts on gay marriage. But time has passed and New York has made gay marriage legal, and Douthat writes about it again, so I have to blog about it once more.

Here's Douthat's latest.

There's nothing too new here, but I think it's worth pointed out nonetheless. I hit this topic pretty hard because I think the religious argument against gay marriage has been given short shift, for two reasons. First, the argument is legitimately hard to express succinctly. But just because an argument is difficult to express does not mean it's wrong, it's just makes it difficult to express. Douthat describes in his earlier posts, how the intermingling of marriage, procreation, and sexuality is complex or "thick", his word, to describe this. And to express this thickness is challenging, but Douthat's arguments are the most well thought out from the opposition side of this debate and definitely worth considering.

Also because this argument has been so poorly made by the conservative side, I think it's also been too easily dismissed, and those who believe in this view have been labeled as bigots and compared to the racists of our nation's earlier years. This is fundamentally unfair.

In Douthat's latest, he laments:

"Critics of gay marriage see this as one of the great dangers in severing the link between marriage and the two realities — gender difference and procreation — that it originally evolved to address. A successful marital culture depends not only on a general ideal of love and commitment, but on specific promises, exclusions and taboos. And the less specific and more inclusive an institution becomes, the more likely people are to approach it casually, if they enter it at all."

He follows this article up here specifically addressing Dan Savage's point of view.

"The ideal of monogamy is a fragile achievement of civilized life, not something that’s written in our glands and genes." Meaning that it's hard to be monogomous especially if you extend that to pre-marriage. It goes against our nature, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's not an ideal worth aspiring toward, and it doesn't mean it's something that society shouldn't enforce, especially considering what's at stake.

This is at the core of all of Douthat's argument and it's written better in his original article I'll quote here again:

"This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.
The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support."

That, in a nutshell is the ideal: that "organic connection between human generations". That my biological kids are mine and my wife's and we are there's. To preserve this unique entity as an ideal is important, to recognize that it's extremely difficult to maintain and thus worthy of extra sociatal support is what Douthat argues.

While Douthat continues to cling to his views, another moderate conservative I admire, David Frum dithers. But his logic as to why?... is just dumb:

It's true that marriage, among the educated middle class, has actually strengthened recently which weakens the argument that gay marriage destroys traditional families. But that's only true if you believe gay marriage is the only and the strongest factor that will destroy families. I believe there are a multitude of societal factors at play and changing gay marriage laws is just one of many and not near the most important. I'm not sure how you can separate these out in way to come to the conclusion Frum comes to.

I meant to blog about this article earlier but I'm getting to it now, and it's too long and difficult to quote from it directly, so you really need to read it because there are a lot of really good points here that goes beyond the argument of gay marriage.

Here's her thoughts on the consequence of loosening divorce laws and how that affected the marriage institution that resonates:

"A couple in 1940 (and even more so in 1910) could go to a minister's parlor, or a justice of the peace, and in five minutes totally change their lives. Unless you are a member of certain highly religious subcultures, this is simply no longer true. That is, of course, partly because of the sexual revolution and the emancipation of women; but it is also because you aren't really making a lifetime commitment; you're making a lifetime commitment unless you find something better to do. There is no way, psychologically, to make the latter as big an event as the former, and when you lost that commitment, you lose, on the margin, some willingness to make the marriage work. Again, this doesn't mean I think divorce law should be toughened up; only that changes in law that affect marriage affect the cultural institution, not just the legal practice."

And her final piece of advice.

"My only request is that people try to be a leeetle more humble about their ability to imagine the subtle results of big policy changes. The argument that gay marriage will not change the institution of marriage because you can't imagine it changing yours personal reaction is pretty arrogant."

The point here is that what matters is what happens on the margins. When you make significant changes to laws it affects both the legal and the cultural identity of that institution with all of the unexpected consequences that go along with that. There are simply no institutions that matter as much as marriage does. The institutional changes matter because at the margin some people will make different choices because of those institutional changes. Their decisions will influence others in unexpected ways. Eventually, marriage in the 21st century will be fundamentally different than what it was in the 20th.

Expanding marriage to include same gender is a significant change. Douthat argues that this change will weaken it. Many, including me, believe it has already been weakened so this affect may be minimal, but I think it's affects may be bigger than any of us realize.

Some final Douthat on Gay Marriage

So, Ross Douthat after a weeklong vacation finally gets around to finishing the second of his two part posts in response to Andrew Sullivan's response to the gay marriage issue: Part 1 and Part 2. I thought his part 2 post was the stronger of the two.

In part 1, he condemns pretty harshly the conservative response to the emerging gay scene in the early 1980's:


" There’s no question that conservatives had an opportunity, amid the end of the closet and the crisis of the AIDS epidemic, to think constructively about what kind of public accommodations should be made for gay relationships, both to avoid the cruelties that the disease cast into sharp relief (longtime lovers denied access to their dying partners’ bedsides, etc.) and to recognize that committed gay relationships, too, have value for society. Instead, conservatives tended to interpret the spread of HIV as a case of an inherently self-destructive culture reaping what it had sowed. And that “inherently” assumption led them to ignore or downplay the conservative turn in gay culture that the disease inspired — a turn that led, eventually, to the arguments for gay marriage as the most stable and plausible alternative to the closet."


The alternative solution he proposes is pretty weak in my humble opinion:


"So what should conservatives have done instead? Basically, they should have pushed (in, let’s say, the early 1980s) for what Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis have urged as a contemporary compromise: A domestic partnership law designed to accommodate gay couples without being sexuality-specific. "

Its a weak solution because, well, I heard this before. But its true, if this would have been offered in the early 1980's, it would have been a radical proposal. But that bridge has been crossed a long time ago, as Douthat readily admits.

But Part 2 is stronger because he gets off the subject of solutions (we are heading toward gay marriage) and back on the subject of lifelong monogamy.

" The benefits of gay marriage, to the couples involved and to their families, are front-loaded and obvious, whereas any harm to the overall culture of marriage and childrearing in America will be diffuse and difficult to measure. I suspect that the formal shift away from any legal association between marriage and fertility will eventually lead to further declines in the marriage rate and a further rise in the out-of-wedlock birth rate (though not necessarily the divorce rate, because if few enough people are getting married to begin with, the resulting unions will presumably be somewhat more stable). But these shifts will probably happen anyway, to some extent, because of what straights have already made of marriage. Or maybe the institution’s long decline is already basically complete, and the formal recognition of gay unions may just ratify a new reality, rather than pushing us further toward a post-marital society. Either way, there won’t come a moment when the conservative argument, with all its talk about institutional definitions and marginal effects and the mysteries of culture, will be able to claim vindication against those who read it (as I know many of my readers do) as a last-ditch defense of bigotry."

Actually Douthat links to an article that deserves its own post - for another time.

Anyway, I am now off the Ross Douthat bandwagon.

More Deep Thoughts on Gay Marriage

In my late night browsing, I encountered two pretty intense articles from Eve Tushnet:

First here:

"I think this worldview denigrates the importance of the body. Our physicality--our incarnation--goes far beyond function. That's why kids who grew up with really amazing, sacrificial stepfathers or father figures or male role models, or adoptive parents, very often express both intense gratitude toward the people who loved and raised them, and intense longing or anger or sorrow toward the biological parents who didn't, or who loved intermittently and from afar. It's possible (I know this, because it happens) to both honor non-biological parents and yearn for the connection of DNA, of flesh. Something is missing when parental love is separated from the fleshly, sweaty, physical union which created the child."

"But the other is what I'm going to call aesthetic sensitivity. I'm calling it that because I think attention to the meaning of the physical is essentially a function of the aesthetic sense. People who feel the loss of the biological parent most keenly are, I think, expressing an insight--not a weakness, not a handicap created by their culture, but an insight into what it is to be human.

These are two separate spectra. Someone can be both intensely sensitive to the loss of the biological parent, and extremely resilient. Someone can be really flailing or self-pitying, and not at all interested in the biological connection. But just as resilience is a good thing in itself, so a deep sense of the importance of physical, fleshly relatedness is a good thing in itself. The "family diversity" movement tends to praise resilience and downplay or even denigrate what I'm calling aesthetic sensitivity. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that they do this because resilience makes the adults' lives easier and the other thing does not."

And then as if she's making an argument with herself, then here:

"Gay marriage promises that, for those of us lucky enough to grow up with parents in a loving/good-enough marriage, we truly can fit our own futures and dreams into the family story we grew up with. We can step into our parents' shoes. You all know that I think this promise is based on some really false beliefs about sex difference and family structure, but believe me, I feel the power and attraction of the promise.

And this longing for home is one reason the Church's silences, clinical language, and general lameness w/r/t speaking to actual gay people is so frustrating. Because the truest and best alternative to the home promised by gay marriage is precisely the home promised by Christ, the loving embrace of the Holy Family. When I say that the cure for alienation is in kneeling at the altar rail, this is not especially believable if the actual Catholics you've known were clueless at best and bullying at worst."

Another Douthat

Just so you know, I'll be following Douthat's post one for one until he changes the subject just because he seems to be in some ways vocalizing thoughts I've had inside for a long time. But also pushing those thoughts further putting my feelings into words I myself have had trouble vocalizing. And every time I read Douthat's posts lately, I just want to say, amen.

His latest post is actually a rebuttal to a conservative criticism.

"The main objective of any serious social conservative, in the end, should be to restore a particular sexual ideal among heterosexuals, not just to forestall the redefinition of the institution of marriage to include gays. The goal should be a world where the struggle to defend marriage is understood primarily as a struggle against divorce and out-of-wedlock births and premarital promiscuity, and not just a world where the law offers a particular distinction to Newt Gingrich’s third marriage that it doesn’t afford Ellen DeGeneres and Portia DeRossi. "

"And if all that social conservatives can ever hope to accomplish is to keep homosexual couples from getting marriage licenses, then there’s a case to be made for living with the public redefinition of the institution, taking the older ideal private, and trying to rebuild a thicker culture of marriage from the ground up."

Yes! Amen.

And Sullivan I think would largely agree with this conclusion:

From Sullivan:

"Ross, I think, is particularly worried about monogamy in this context - because it is so unnatural a state for most of us. The threat to monogamy, of course, is not universally - but largely - a function of testosterone and evolutionary biology. And the heterosexual marriage ideal offers social status to males to stick to one woman for the sake of children (and his wife)."

"Of course, actual real life-long monogamy is relatively rare, especially if you take into account pre-marital sex. And therefore, the ideals of monogamy and hypocrisy are deeply entwined. But the social conservative will be fine with some measure of hypocrisy as a concession to human nature as long as the norm is enforced. I know of no more sophisticated treatment of this than Jon Rauch's here and most acutely here."

So, what I don't want to see in America is a continuation of the cultural civil war, where both sides set the parameters of their argument, neither willing to concede one iota on any of it. What I do want to see is ways in which both sides can find common ground and then from that common ground we can define policy and shape our culture to build something that improves society.

I think finding ways to increase monogamy, decrease divorce and sexual promiscuity would be one obvious place to look. Certainly, those ideals should not be controversial.

More Douthat Follow Up

Ross Douthat is going to continue to post responses to the many bloggers who have rebutted his article on gay marriage and just as I think that he's made all of the points he can possibly make, he posts again and brings up a whole new series of insights that really, truly resonate.

In this post, the most powerful point is made by quoting someone else, Eve Tushnet, who is probably one of only a few who could ever to hope to meet this description: fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate. She does not see herself as disordered; she does not struggle to be straight, but she insists that her religion forbids her a sex life. I doubt that Eve is someone who realistically could be widely emulated, I just mention her because she makes some really interesting points in the gay marriage debate.

Here's one quoted by Douthat in his blog:

"Americans are both extremely naïve about sex and extremely selfish about marriage. But marriage evolved to structure the specific ways in which sex between a man and woman can be really devastating to society, or really fruitful. In order for men and women to have sex with one another, to avoid causing a lot of disruption and wrong action in society, they have to do a lot of difficult things. The fact that a lot of them don’t want to do those things now and don’t even see those things as related to marriage is part of the problem, not an excuse to further move away from the idea of marriage as the structure. For example, one of the things that you find now if you talk to young people about how do sex and marriage connect, is that a lot them are very into fidelity within marriage … but they don’t see marriage as having any effect on their actions before they get married. That was not always true. Marriage exists in large part to structure how you behave before you marry. Not that anyone would expect all or even most people to be completely abstinent before marriage, but if you have that as your goal and ideal, and you have a sense that marriage is at least where it’s proper to be having sex, then you will probably have a little bit less sex outside of marriage. They are making it much less believable that marriage has any other purpose other than putting the good housekeeping seal of approval on your personal relationships.
So if humans were perfectly able to control their reproduction, could pick when they had kids and with whom, and men and women are interchangeable both socially and biologically, then you don’t have marriage. Why would you? It arises to manage not only procreation, but also the social and biological differences between men and women prior to reproduction. So, that said, if you have a unisex model of marriage, which is what gay marriage requires, you are no longer able to talk about marriage as regulating heterosexuality and therefore you’re not able to say: Look, there are things that are different about heterosexual and homosexual relationships. There are different dangers, there are different challenges, and, therefore, there are probably going to be different rules."

Douthat continues this argument in some incredibly important ways:

"The interplay of fertility, reproductive impulses and gender differences in heterosexual relationships is, for want of a better word, 'thick.' All straight relationships are intimately affected by this interplay in ways that gay relationships are not."

He makes incredibly deep points about how even infertile straight couples or straight couples past child-bearing age experience marriage in ways that are not possible by gay couples.

He uses the adjective "thick" to explain why these arguments are so difficult to defend:

"The particularities of heterosexuality are very particular, and only a thick understanding of wedlock, I suspect, can hope to do the kind of important cultural work that Tushnet is describing, and push heterosexuals not only to think about their behavior within marriage, but also how their entire sexual lives fit into the marital ideal. (This thickness issue also helps explain what often sounds like tongue-tiedness and/or desperation from social conservatives when they’re asked to explain what, exactly, it is about marriage that makes it distinctively heterosexual: the whole 'well, it’s about love and monogamy and complementarity and fertility and sex differences and childrearing and …' refrain, which seems unconvincing to many people, should be understood in part as an attempt to grapple with just this complexity.)"

But if you expand marriage to include gay couples the institution loses this thickness and turns an institution for one type of relation into three: "because it’s an ideal that needs to encompass not two but three different kinds of sexual relationships — straight, gay male, and lesbian. So it ends up being about the universals of love and commitment, rather than any of the particular dynamics of heterosexual intimacy."

That thinness makes it easier to understand, describe, and, in the context of a political debate, defend, but it does, in no doubt turn something that began as a very thick idea into something much less so.

Andrew Sullivan, by the way, has an almost equally compelling counter to this post here.

Where Andrew Sullivan (who is a gay conservative by the way and makes arguments that resonate with me from this point of view) agrees with almost all of Douthat's points, but he makes the very powerful point that the world has changed and our laws have to change to accommodate it (my interpretive summary):

Key quote:

"But here's the thing: what, exactly, is the alternative in a world where openly gay people and couples exist?
Ross has never told us. But it seems to me from the logic of social conservatism that those most in danger of the social chaos social conservatives fear are those who would benefit most from being subjected to the cultural power of this institution. We know the consequences of marital breakdown for the black and urban poor: immiseration, poverty and dysfunction. We also know the consequences of a society that allows gay men sexual freedom, while denying them any social institutions to channel their love and desire: 300,000 young corpses. But the social conservative who insists that the family is vital for the black underclass somehow believes it is just as vital to deny it to gay men. In fact, social conservatives are intent on preventing this integrating institution from helping, guiding and ennobling a group most vulnerable to the consequences of emotional and sexual chaos. "

Sex is most obviously much more than procreation. But the fact that sex can and does lead to life is powerful. But the gay community is not going away. They are here and they deserve much more than exclusion. There needs to be a way we can do both and it will be hard politically to do so: to come up with a way to satisfy both the Douthat point of view and the Sullivan point of view.

Douthat has promised to respond to Sullivan directly (again in my mind Sullivan's arguments are the most powerful of any I've read so far) and I'll anxiously await.

But I guess what I hope to see is a world where those on the left can recognize and understand these specific Douthat points and at least try to make these sorts of concessions, concessions that Sullivan seems willing to make himself.

UPDATE: I recognize that this is a losing argument, that Sullivan is probably more correct that Douthat. Our world has changed and holding on to a legal definition of an institution that was designed for a world that no longer exists is probably not realistic. But being one person who is determined to live up to the marriage ideal and who lives within a religious community that also strives to live up to this ideal, it means something to me. Nonetheless, it seems inevitable to me that the laws will change toward Sullivan's vision of it. The goal, then, is that their continues to remain enough cultural space for religious and other institutions to provide a framework for something more traditional for those who choose it.

Ross Douthat's Almost Identical Argument on Gay Marriage as Mine

Here is Ross Douthat's article in the NY Times.

Its almost the identical argument I made, but he blows me away in his ability to express it. I guess that's why he's getting the big bucks.

UPDATE:

Douthat furthers his point in his blog here.


"This means that if the ideology that justifies defining marriage as lifelong heterosexual monogamy gets swept into history’s dustbin, we won’t suddenly be flung into a landscape where the only real things are people and the people they love. We’ll just get a different ideology of marriage in its place, one that makes a different set of assumptions and generalizations and invests the institution with a different kind of purpose. And we don’t need a judge’s ruling (though Judge Vaughn Walker’s analysis was certainly clarifying!) to know what that ideology will look like: It’s the increasingly commonplace theory that marriage exists to celebrate romantic love and provide public recognition for mutually-supportive couples, with no inherent connection of any kind to gender difference and/or procreation, and with only a rhetorical connection to the ideal of permanence.

Since this is basically the theory that much of our society already holds, redefining marriage to include gay relationships is unlikely to have anything like the kind of impact on American life that, say, the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s did. But again, I think it’s a little naive to assume that it will have no impact at all — that legal changes don’t beget further cultural changes, and that public definitions don’t influence private conduct. Maybe the potential consequences are so vanishingly minimal that they’re easily outweighed by the benefits to gay couples; that’s certainly a reasonable position. But looking out across America’ landscape of heterosexual dysfunction, it’s still a little hard for me to accept that what this moment demands of us is the legal formalization — indeed, the constitutionalization, if Judge Walker has his way — of the ideological conceit that marriage has no necessary connection to gender difference, procreation or childrearing."

By the way Andrew Sullivan has a pretty powerful rebute to Douthat here.

"If you have total gay freedom and no gay institutions that can channel love and desire into commitment and support, you end up in San Francisco in the 1970s. That way of life - however benignly expressed, however defensible as the pent-up unleashed liberation of a finally free people - helped kill 300,000 young human beings in this country in our lifetime. Ross may think that toll is unimportant, or that it was their fault, but I would argue that a Catholic's indifference to this level of death and suffering and utter refusal to do anything constructive to prevent it happening again, indeed a resort to cruel stigmatization of gay people that helps lead to self-destructive tendencies, is morally evil."

SECOND UPDATE:

Douthat, has another follow up post that's worth recording, right here.

"Culture shapes law, of course: Judge Walker’s decision last week would be unimaginable without the cultural shift that’s made gay marriage seem first plausible and then necessary to many people. But law tends to turn around and shape culture right back. And this is particularly true when the law in question is constitutional law, because constitutional rights carry a distinctive legal weight and an even more distinctive cultural freight. (To take just one example, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the cultural space for making a moral critique of pornography has shrunk apace in the decades since the Supreme Court expanded First Amendment protections for pornographers, and limited the reach of obscenity laws.)"

I mention this because it focuses on something fundamental about what it means to be a cultural conservative that has always been at odds with the libertarianism that is at root of the tea party movement. That government has a role to play in shaping cultural down a direction that is fundamentally better for society. In the blogpost, Douthat cites cigarettes as a positive example of this, pornography as a negative one.

I identify with these lines of reasoning because they defined me as a Republican for so many years and these beliefs are still within me even though I've switched parties.

Second Reactions to the Proposition 8 Ruling

Again, I really, sincerely believe that the gay marriage issue is very similar to the abortion issue in some important ways. Most importantly these are issues that force a nation to define its collective faith. I know there's so much talk about a separation between church and state and that we can have no state religion. But how can you have a nation without faith. How we choose to define so many of our laws demand these gigantic leaps into uncertainty. One of the most important questions we had to answer definitively is when exactly does human life begin. And the courts in Roe v. Wade answered it and we have been living with its consequences ever since.

And now what role does a marriage relationship play in our society. In what way does either the federal or state government step in and define a legal marriage union. Why should government even get involved? These are largely questions of faith and its why the gay community has demanded something much more than a legal civil union, where they get many (all?) of the same legal benefits traditional marriage partnerships enjoy. But I think, understandably, they demand more. They want formal recognition of marriage equality, by our government, by society, collectively.

And its getting tougher every single day to make cogent arguments against it. There's an interesting point made in this blogpost.

"I’m still going through the closing arguments from yesterday’s Proposition 8 hearings, but I’m struck by how weak the other side’s case is. It’s truly empty of any reasoned argument or sound evidence. The proponents of the Proposition were relying on conventional wisdom and ‘the way marriages has always been’ arguments without explaining why it should stay that way or what harm would come to society if it changed."

Its hard to really make the case anymore that gay marriage would detrimentally affect society and families because the traditional family unit has already been so thoroughly trashed by our culture. I think addiction, the cavalier attitude toward sex and promiscuity, the lack of commitment all of that is having a much bigger stress on families and marriages. And kids suffer as a result.

In the link, the author quotes the prop 8 proponents:

"The proponents of Prop. 8 dismissed these claims and insisted that marriage is about channeling naturally procreative sexual conduct 'into stable and enduring unions' in order to “minimize what I would call irresponsible procreation.'"

I think this is self evident statement, but there are a slew of statistics to back up the claim that children born into unstable and non-enduring unions suffer. But does gay marriage make this more likely? Maybe, but if so, only at the margins.

In my mind, if there was a way that society and all of its institutions, both public and private, could promote and ensure that straight marriages lasted so that fewer children were aborted or abandoned or raised by someone else.

I have three children and another on the way. When I look into my kids eyes I see, quite literally myself. Granted, they are unique and individual in significant ways, but they also carry a big part of me and of my wife. They have our DNA, pieces of both of our personalities. They look like us, in so many ways they are us. We are bound.

I have a deep embedded connection and responsibility to them. I feel this biologically. Even if all I was was a sperm donor this would be true.

To have a man and a woman come together in love and with commitment and produce life is incredible, its holy, its a miracle. I feel this in a deep, visceral way. If there was a way we could protect and preserve this and hold it sacred, elevating it above almost everything else, I wish we could.

Again, I think its harder and harder to make a strong argument against gay marriage. It's because we collectively have already done a pretty poor job in preserving and protecting and strengthening traditional marriage. And the gay community has nothing at all to do with that.

First Reactions to Proposition 8

My initial reactions on court ruling in California overturning proposition 8 as unconstitutional are feelings of disappointment. Profoundly, this ruling has potentially larger consequences that extend beyond the borders of California affecting every state who has already passed bans on homosexual marriage, bans that the federal courts have now deemed unconstitutional.

I do not want to get into the tricky debate about whether we should equate gay and straight marriage. But let me suggest that this is not and should not be an easy debate. The problem I have with most political discussions (and I'm guilty of this too) is that we never pause to consider the other side. I think the conservative point of view shares some blame in this. If you scream too loud and too long and make thoughtless assumptions about the other side, resorting too quickly to ad hominum attacks, don't be surprised to see these tactics returned.

I guess my biggest worry is that those on the left side of this debate will try to make the case that the case for gay marriage is exactly the same as the case for interracial marriage back in the day. Which follows that churches and other institutions and individuals against gay marriage are making the same bad mistakes as those who made the case against interracial marriages in the past.

I would hope that its obvious or at least that you consider it may be obvious to some that the differences between gender is far more different than the differences of skin color.

And if we start making laws from the bench effectively removing these discussions from the public discourse (no matter how messy or hard the latter course may be) it hurts both sides of this and other issues. You lose trust and you sabotage what a democracy should be all about.

This was the fundamental tragedy of Roe v. Wade, in my opinion. Abortion is a very tough issue, involving tricky, religious arguments about when life begins, when the baby has a claim on civil and constitutional protections. When the courts made this issue all about the woman's rights, it ripped this issue out of the public discourse and actually made it more polarizing not less.

This is different than the civil rights cases, some of which were decided by courts because those were legitimate violations of constitutional rights. Now, how many churches out there ban interracial marriages? Maybe they exist, but they are widely scorned and marginalized.

But many churches do have strong and legitimate religious reasons for being against gay marriage. Does this mean that state and federal law should follow certain church beliefs on this issue? No. But it would be much better if this issue could be decided in a democratic forum and not dictated by judicial fiat.

The judicial ruling needs to be overturned. Lets continue the discussions recognizing that both sides of the issue have legitimate points of view.