Mike, abortion is obviously less likely to be banned because it can’t be banned barring one of two unlikely developments: a Supreme Court majority willing to overrule Roe or a constitutional amendment.

I’m responding though because I want to correct a misimpression I may inadvertently have caused. When I drew the analogy between anti-abortion advocacy and anti-gay-marriage advocacy, I meant only to compare the vigor of the two movements, not to suggest that abortion and gay marriage were on the same moral plane. I don’t think they are. The way Mike asks which of them is more likely to be banned — a question I concede I may unintentionally have invited — intimates that, all other things being equal, the answer lies in the comparative ardor of the opposition movements. But other things are decidedly not equal.

Abortion is the taking of human life. By contrast, while I believe marriage is an institution that is and should be reserved for committed, heterosexual couples, I have great sympathy for gay couples in committed monogamous relationships who desire societal recognition of their unions and the attendant protections of the civil law. That the two issues (abortion and marriage) happen to be on the same social conservative menu does — for me, anyway — mean they are matters of equal gravity.

I must say that if the only problem with gay marriage were the limited number of gay people who actually want to get married, my inclination would be to live and let live: There aren’t enough of them to pose a material threat to our understanding of marriage as an institution, and it’s hard enough to be happy in this life.

But, alas, the problems with gay marriage are (a) the activist movement behind it, which is bent on undermining the pride of place society rightly accords traditional marriage and condemning as bigotry the deference society grants good-faith religious objections to homosexual behavior; and (b) gay marriage’s being rooted in the law of equal protection rather than the political process (i.e., the indulgence of well-intentioned people). Politics has the luxury of being illogical in order to facilitate societal compromises: You don’t have to permit polygamy because it follows from the same principles by which you justify permitting gay marriage; you don’t have to coerce Christian adoption agencies to violate their religious tenets in order to facilitate gay adoptions; you can draw sensible lines that commonsense people draw. The law doesn’t easily allow for that. That’s why society would be better, healthier, and more legitimate if we kept the courts out of matters that ought to be decided politically.