But Mildred Loving did. And it was not the desire or intention of all of the other black women in America that mattered to the Supreme Court. It was Mildred’s right to marry whom she chose.

What bothers me about the whole “gays don’t want monogamy argument” is that it’s based on a faulty assumption: That rights should only be granted to a particular class of people if a certain percentage of people in that class want to exercise them. The thing is, the fact that we have a given right means we have the option of exercising it. Some will choose that option, others will not. The latter is perfectly valid. And in reality, they’re exercising their right in their own right.

Exactly. It’s totally irrelevant. Look at adoption rights. How many gays really plan on adopting children or have done so already? I would argue far fewer than would seek legal recognition of their monogamous relationship. And yet it’s an indispensable right for those who want to raise families, and one that has held up to political challenge far better than same sex marriage.

I liked it when she refocused one question, indicating that the questioner was forgetting that relationships were about both “entry” and “exit”. We forget that ‘promoting marriage’ is really promoting a contract that is fully dissoluble, despite the Great Hopes that people have for it.

The questions about the marriage uptake rate in the Netherlands or in Belgium could be used to suggest all kinds of things. We don’t know yet, how it will be summarized – proof that gay marriage is about a Left-agenda, not marriage; proof of a radical alteration of the ‘institution’; how little we know about this ‘new stuff’ to take such a ‘big step’. (Personally, I think that it has a lot to do with people who grew up in an age when people were focused on avoiding the police and whatnot, rather than getting relationship recognition…but those habits and attitudes are ending).

Suffice it to say, it all will be to give an excuse to those on the bench who might be looking for one. Indeed, one can imagine the opposite, frankly, the day when marriage advocates say, “Even the gays are getting married, why aren’t you?”

Thanks for catching that slip-up. It’s corrected now.

Dr. Scott

Box Turtle Bulletin doen’t have “fact checkers” and I am not a “reporter”. This is a blog site with no employees and only volunteer contributors who have full time jobs but write here in their free time.

And you are incorrect about whether suspect class is on trial. While the CA Supreme Court found that gays are a suspect class (as has Connecticut and Iowa), Perry v. Schwarzenegger is not being tried under the CA Constitution. This is a federal case under the US Constitution and the SCOTUS has not yet found gays to be a suspect class.

It’s kind of hard to take seriously your umbrage at the easy typographical slippage of “suspect class” to “subject class” (I knew what he meant) when you follow it up with “hole water.”

However, isn’t it obvious that they only try to float these flimsy arguments because they CAN’T defend their real underlying motivation: they believe that homosexuality is inherently immoral.

Dr. John Corvino (google him for some grat videos, unless you live in China) has addressed the question of homosexuality and morality in great detail, and quite effectively.

The real problem is that the Prop 8 gang didn’t arrive at their objections to homosexuality via rational means in the first place, and so refuse to accept any rational rebuke, no matter how inescapable it is.

Look at it another way: There are hundreds of millions of Americans who aren’t interested in protesting. Does that mean we can or should get rid of the right to protest? If you apply the underlying principles of the “gays don’t really want monogamy” argument consistently, the answer is yes. But somehow, I don’t foresee the prop 8 crowd coming to that conclusion.