Gay Marriage Poll

The New York Times poll out today show a broad support for a Constitutional Amendment to codify marriage as, well, marriage. This is good news, and even the Times seems disinclined to try to spin it the other way. While the numbers outright opposed to such a ban (40%) are a lot higher than I'd like, the country is pretty much about where any acute observer would have placed it. No big surprises here, except that as people focus more on the subject, the less they like it.

What the gay lobby deliberately obscures is the difference between the gay person and the gay relationship. We can, as a society, rightly decide that a person's orientation is none of our business, but that we don't wish to enable certain relationships with legal support and sanction. It's a distinction that the country still seems able to make. Certainly, if we ever want to reverse this trend, out first step is to refuse to continue to retreat.

"The Republican House leadership is having its own internal fight to determine what to do," said Winnie Stachelberg, political director of the Human Rights Campaign. "There is no consensus among conservatives, libertarians and Republicans," she said. "Many of them say they don't support marriage for same-sex couples, but to amend the Constitution for social issues is a very bad idea."

Unless, of course, it's the courts doing the amending. In a country where the courts seem more and more willing to ignore the plain meaning of the text to satisfy their own notions of morality, I'm not sure that even a Constitutional Amendment, in the long run, will have any meaning.