Consistent with his previous criticism of the anti-Prop 8 lawsuit, Jonathan Rauch—a leading supporter of same-sex marriage—condemns Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling last week as “a radical one” that “sets the cause of marriage equality crosswise with moderation, gradualism, and popular sovereignty.”  Here’s one excerpt (emphasis added):

Now, I agree with Walker that gay marriage is unlikely to cause any significant social harm and will do much good. But the judge insists that the testimony of a handful of expert witnesses in his courtroom rules out the possibility of harm so definitively as to make any attempt at caution or gradualism irrational. The evidence, he holds, is “beyond debate.” In an unpredictable world, that kind of sweeping certainty would leave any Burkean gulping.

(Rauch does offer considerable praise for aspects of Walker’s ruling.  For example, he calls it “a formidable piece of work, bristling with evidence and carefully reasoned.”  I think that this praise is wholly undeserved.  As I hope to show in more detail, Walker simply ignored mounds of unwelcome evidence and overstated the evidence that he cited, and his reasoning is incoherent and contrary to multiple precedents that he doesn’t even acknowledge, much less try to distinguish away.)