MORE AMENDMENT SPARRING BETWEEN SULLIVAN AND NATIONAL REVIEW: And me, at the end.

Andrew Sullivan: "Ramesh Ponnuru ducks the central question in National Review's endorsement of a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage. If NR wants to preserve marriage as an institution, why is it happy to see states create a competing marriage-lite institution, civil unions, for heterosexuals? If the point of social policy is to protect marriage and to increase incentives for marriage (except, of course, for homosexuals), why acquiesce in an institution that will undermine it far more deeply and far more comprehensively than gay marriage ever could?"

Ramesh Ponnuru of NR: "If my previous post on this subject had a 'bedrock' point, it was that Sullivan had failed to deal with the purely anti-judicial amendment that the editorial recommends as a fallback position (a compromise that is, I would add, not all that far from one that Sullivan has himself proposed). That failure continues."

Me, Eve: Ramesh didn't address the "Why not bar civil unions in a constitutional amendment as well?" question, so I'll link to something I posted a while back on my reasons for thinking that a federal marriage amendment is not the place to bar civil unions. Basically, 1) Preserving the ideal, "marriage," is central;
2) It's really hard to craft a non-convoluted amendment that bars civil unions;
3) Such an amendment might also be construed as prohibiting states from expanding and strengthening freedom of contract, thus keeping unmarried people from designating another person to perform certain acts (e.g. medical decisions) or receive certain benefits;
4) Such an amendment probably couldn't pass.

Dunno what all that has to do with hating gay people.
posted by Eve at 5:38 PM | link

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