I know he’s traveling, and won’t have the
opportunity to respond till later, but I wanted to say before it slipped my
mind that I think Jonah’s wrong to come out against the Federal Marriage
Amendment
. He thinks it’s wrong for a couple of reasons. One, he believes that
federalism should be allowed to work here, giving states the right to
experiment. The problem is, as one of his correspondents put it, gay
marriage quickly becomes a federal issue when a gay couple married in
Massachusetts moves to Texas, where they’re treated as unmarried. Then it
goes to the federal courts and probably to SCOTUS, where (as Novak says) the
court that gave us Lawrence will be inclined to give us gay marriage,
nationalized. Secondly, Jonah compares the FMA’s unworkability to the
amendment banning alcohol, on the idea that you can’t mandate by law what
most people don’t want by custom. The general point may be correct, but the
analogy to Prohibition breaks down here: Prohibition would have worked if
government had been able to maintain an absolute monopoly over the
production of alcohol. That was not, and is not possible, ergo moonshiners,
speakeasies, etc. But government does have an absolute monopoly over the
production of marriages. If they were prohibited by Constitutional
amendment, there would be no such thing as marriage speakeasies, because
marriage in any socially meaningful context cannot exist independently of
governmental sanction.