Thanks for all the nice and/or interesting feedback to Friday’s epic-length G-File. As for the constructive – and sometimes less than constructive – criticisms, I’d like to make a couple points.

First, lots of folks seem peeved by the fact that I was dealing with a narrow aspect of the gay marriage debate. But that was my intent from the beginning – to deal with a specific argument, namely the one made by Rauch. Obviously, there are other arguments for and against gay marriage but I was trying to address the “Hayekian” argument offered by Rauch on its own terms.

Second, I shouldn’t have made it sound like I was saying gay marriage is inevitable, even if I suspect that it may well be. My argument about waiting is not an argument about waiting for the inevitable. There have been plenty of “enlightened” social policies which seemed to have the weight of politics and history behind them which have never panned out. Indeed, Friedrich Hayek spent much of his life battling against those who thought he was a crank for not admitting that socialism was inevitable. More recently, the Equal Rights Amendment failed when many were confident history was on its side. This magazine itself was founded on the mantra of Standing athwart history, yelling Stop. And even if something seems inevitable that doesn’t mean that one should automatically accept it. Whittacker Chambers was confident that he was switching from the winning to the losing side of the Cold War when he abandoned the Communists and joined with the West. My point is that waiting in and of itself has great social benefits.