Infinite MonkeysWe've not had very much to say here about same-sex marriage, or at least I haven't, for good reason. It's a sticky wicket of a question, and hashing it out with the care and seriousness it demands would cut into precious drinking time. (And that's just during business hours! -Ed.) I wrote a bit about the marriage debate back in 2000, in the months leading up to the vote on California's Proposition 22. (Curiously, none of it appears to have survived on the web. I should fix that.) The gist: same-sex marriage is a bad idea and wrong, and I didn't mention the Bible even once.
Well, more than 60% of voters in that election decided that marriage should be limited to one man and one woman. Period. But not end of story.
Proposition 22 carried the day by large majorities throughout the state, with one very notable exception: the five counties in and around the Bay Area. It's interesting to look at the fallout from that election now, when newspaper columnists fell all over themselves trying to explain away the outcome. So it was only a matter of time before something like the recent business up there came to pass. I happen to think it's nothing more than another case of a local official flouting the law to appeal to the desires of his constituents, a la Judge Roy Moore. As Hugh Hewitt observed on the air yesterday, this is the very definition of demagogy. XRLQ makes a very good prima facie case for throwing the book at SF Mayor Gavin Newsom. It will never happen, of course.
Again, I really don't want to get into this argument now. But I think if you believe in the rule of law, then you cannot see these "marriages" in San Francisco as anything other than a farce and a mockery.
Update: Eugene Volokh offers a justification for Newsom's actions, and attempts to refute the Newsom-Moore comparison. He writes:
...though I think Mayor Newsom's legal argument will and should lose, I think he's acting within the American constitutional tradition in his actions. People can certainly disagree with his decision on the merits, and argue that it doesn't deny equal protection of the laws for the state to limit marriages to male-female couples. But I don't think that one ought to also fault Newsom for usurpation, or departure from the rule of law, so long as his position is a legally plausible interpretation of the state constitution.Interesting, but I don't think it trumps XRLQ's argument.
Update II: I just discovered that the links I included to archived stories in the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner didn't work. I tried and tried to fix them, to no avail. That's a shame, because they're worth reading. If you're interested, go to SF Gate and search for the following: