Gay marriage: Now coming to the red states?

Like it or not, “same-sex marriage may soon be coming to the South,” said Matt Pearcein the Los Angeles Times. A federal judge ruled last week that Virginia’s 2006 constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage violated the civil rights of gay men and women, and should not stand. In her ringing ruling, Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen wrote that racial segregation and discrimination against women were once justified by claims of tradition and morality—the same rationale now being made to justify denying marriage to same-sex couples. But there is no “rational basis,” she said, to deny gays and lesbians the same right to marry as heterosexuals. The Virginia ruling comes as part of a tsunami-like wave of similar decisions by state and federal judges in such conservative bastions as Kentucky, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Utah. After the Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act last year, it “set a powerful precedent for equality,” said David S. Cohen and Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com. It’s just a matter of time before gay marriage is legal in every state.

That would be a defeat not only for traditional morality but also for democracy, said Dennis Prager in RealClearPolitics.com. In Virginia, Oklahoma, Utah, Kentucky, and California, clear majorities of the voting public chose to amend their state constitutions to reflect the traditional concept of marriage: a sacred union between a man and woman for the purpose of creating and raising children. But in an act of “breathtaking hubris,” federal judges are now substituting their own opinions for the will of the people and millennia of tradition. Let people of faith beware, said Rod Dreher in The American Conservative. In the eyes of judges, “traditional Christians are all segregationists now.”

If the shoe fits, wear it, said Jonathan Capehart in The Washington Post. How appropriate that Virginia is the same state that banned interracial marriage until the Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision. In its DOMA ruling, the current Supreme Court punted on the question of whether state bans on gay marriage are unconstitutional, hoping to postpone a ruling that would enrage the Right. But Virginia’s ruling explicitly equates same-sex couples with interracial couples, and thus challenges higher courts to rule on whether gay-marriage bans violate the “equal protection” clause of the Constitution. Sooner or later, the justices won’t be able to punt.

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