Like Ed Whelan, I too have a piece in the latest issue of National Review, in my case an article titled “What’s Loving Got to Do With It?” Here’s a bit of it (available in full to subscribers only, I believe):
. . . America’s shameful record of “anti-miscegenation” laws is a historical anomaly. Rooted in slavery and codified during the Jim Crow era after the Civil War, legal prohibitions on interracial marriage spread ultimately to 30 states by the second quarter of the 20th century. These laws had nothing as such to do with defining marriage or regulating what was a legitimate marital union. They had everything — and only — to do with paranoid racial theories entertained by a white power elite obsessed with the “purity” of their own race.
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In our entire legal history, no one bothered to legislate a restriction of marriage to sexually complementary couples until the day before yesterday because everyone understood what “marriage” meant and would (if asked) have thought it naturally impossible for two men or two women to marry. No injustice to anyone was ever the intent or purpose of American marriage laws where same-sex couples are concerned — in stark contrast to the purposeful Jim Crow attack on men and women of different races. When states began in the 1990s and 2000s to legislate the man–woman definition of marriage, it was to protect the conjugal meaning from redefinition by culture warriors and judicial activists — not to interfere with marriages everyone recognized as actual ones but wished to prevent for the sake of a racist ideology.
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If the partisans of judicially imposed same-sex marriage think a ruling in its favor will be as triumphant as Loving was, they are deluding themselves. Such a ruling would not vindicate the ancient idea of marriage, shedding a repugnant distortion of it adopted for narrow, prejudicial reasons. It would be a flagrant innovation, a redefinition of marriage by judicial fiat, not the last defeat of exhausted ideologues but the first broadside in a new phase of the culture war, its grapeshot indiscriminately wounding marriage as an institution, the welfare of children, the rule of law, and the freedom of Americans to live and act according to their religiously informed consciences.
You can read the rest here, if you subscribe to NR.