My old friend Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune shows why the federal amendment banning gay marriage (not merely restraining “runaway judges,” but forbidding legislatures from allowing gay marriages, as well) is sputtering out, in his latest column, “Conservatives Are Losing on Gay Rights.”
They’re angry for the same reason that the anti-globalization activists are angry: they’re losing.
Aren’t conservatives supposed to favor federalism?
Regardless of one’s opinion on the underlying topic, the push for a federal amendment banning gay marriage stands in direct and frontal contradiction with any claim to support federalim and states’ rights.
In addition to that, it is also totally inconsistent with the line of reasoning many of the same people take when it comes to abortion.
Finally, and perhaps worst of all, they are laying the ground for a possible future federal amendment *enforcing* gay marriage and depriving themselves of one of the best arguments they could have for rejecting it (federalism). By their current actions, the conservatives supporting this amendment are implicitly affirming that this is a matter that should be regulated at the federal level.
In my opinion, all social policies should be voted on at the state level. If some states recognize gay marriages, fine. If some don’t, that’s fine too.
An issue such as this is not a one size fit all. I believe most people’s objection to gay marriage is against homosexuality, not necessarily the homosexual. Of course there are many individuals that are not discrete enough to separate the two. However, demanding that God fearing American people to throw out the window their Judaic-Christian belief on marriage is going to ruffle some feathers.
Do you (th eperson who commented above) really mean “all”social policies? Would that include denying equal rights to women, or to racial or ethnic or religious groups? The problem is that if you do that, you’re undermining the idea that the policies “should be voted on at the state level,” since you’re not specifying who has the right to vote. So there would have to be some role for the federal government, otherwise there is no requirement that the states even have a fair vote, as opposed to a dictatorship or an oligarchy of some sort. That’s still consistent with leaving decisions on gay marriage with the states, but to say that that should be decided on at the state level still requires some minimal criteria to determine who gets to decide and how.
Federalism only has value insofar as it serves to protect freedom. A federal govt acting to restrain a municipal or state govt is doing something bad if it’s acting to centralize power, but if it is acting to either protect people from the government (think Lawrence v Texas) or to protect people where the lower govt refused to (for example, refusing to enforce the rights of certain classes of people), then I think federalism, which is nothing more than a useful tactic, should be ignored. In any case, it certainly shouldn’t be fetishized.
Conservative guru Bill Bennett said that conservatives have lost the anti-marriage debate and it is only a matter of time. In this film clip Jon Stewart skewers Bennett on the gay marriage issue. Normally Bennett does a good job fighting his opponents. But in this discussion he is quickly made into mince. Stewart really knows how to take the wind out of their sails. I recommend watching it. Not only is it fun but a major concession.
I guess the html for the link didn’t work. If you want to see the film where Bennett is roasted it is here.
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2006/06/anti-marriage-amendment-fails.html
I guess the conservatives who wish to enact a federal amendment banning gay marriage regard federalism in exactly the same light as Ben Kilpatrick does and have therefore decided to ignore it in this issue.
That’s too bad, because federalism and decentralization, like other checks on on political power, work only to the extent that they are not considered merely “useful tactics”.
Conservatives favor federalism in the same way they favor fiscal responsibility, avoidance of no-win wars, etc…. For them, these are principles in name only, useful for creating a self-image, but irrelevant for actual policy decisions…hence not even tactics.
Ben K. and AAA both make some sense to me. Federalism, like rule of law, or democratic voting, is *by itself* of no particular value — it’s when it is part of a package of institutions that is based on respect for individual liberty that it is a desirable thing.
And when it is part of such a package, it is more than a “tactic.” Abandoning it on a case by case basis, whenever it seems convenient to do so for whatever reason, is equivalent to not having such constraints at all.
Tom the Libertarian begs the state for its blessing, but somehow its the Krazy Kook Kultists over at Mises that realize what place the state has in the marriage bed: http://www.mises.org/story/2209
(That is to say: No place at all.)
Conservatives need to wake up and realize that if they really had faith in their dogmatic believes concerning marriage, they wouldn’t need the state at all to defend it. They would realize that all the state does in marriage is promote permissiveness.
Here’s my favorite new innovation in marriage, it does more than challenge the dogmatic believes of the orthodox religious, it even challenges the dogmatic beliefs of those supporting homosexual marriage. In Canada, 7 women have married themselves. I can’t wait to see the outcry from those bigots who advocate multiple person marriages. What I want to know is what are the tax advantages of self marriage? What would a divorce look like?
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/jun/06062203.html
Aaron G. overlooks two important problems.
1. People often wish to create legal relationships with other persons. That is at least one of the features of a marriage; people obligate themselves to each other and they create special rights that others don’t have. Under current laws, a hospital may be required to grant access to a person in a coma to family members (siblings, parents, even cousins or more distant family members) and those family members may deny access to one’s best friend. A marriage relationship overrides such default specifications of who has the right to make such decisions. Similarly, marriage is often a key to gaining the legal right of residence. People who are allowed to marry are allowed to live with their partners, and people who are not allowed to marry are not allowed to live with their partners. Whether the state is “in the marriage bed” or not, those will remain legal issues. As it is, gay people are not allowed to create such legal relationships, although they can be approximated — quite imperfectly — through powers of attorney, wills, and other contractual solutions. Such currently available contractual solutions are not, however, applicable to such matters as legal rights of residence.
2. I wonder whether Aaron G.’s answer to the case of Loving v. Virginia, which overturned restrictions on inter-racial marriage, would have been to oppose allowing blacks and whites to marry and instead to insist that “the solution” was to get the state “out of the marriage bed” altogether, rather than to have done something so distasteful to so many as allowing people of different “races” to marry.