- Not Whether but How: Gay Marriage and the Revival of Burkean Conservatism.
It's based on what we called Burkean Conservatism in the section on ideology. It highlights the importance of institutions that evolve organically on providing stability in society. Here's a taste of the argument:
Now, for Burkean conservatives same-sex marriage is a particular conundrum because it presents so many competing narratives and so many uncertainties. In the Jonathan Rauch narrative, for example, same-sex marriage is a Burkean no-brainer. It is good for social order because it provides gay couples with caregivers and helps them build stable families that are integrated into their communities. Why, after all, would anyone want same-sex couples to raise their children out of wedlock? How can society possibly benefit from denying these couples (and their kids) the manifold increases in health, economic security, and happiness which marriage brings? Why not tie them to each other and their communities? Moreover, in the Rauch narrative, gay marriage also advances the causes of equality, liberty, and individual dignity. And still more: given the ways in which marriage has changed over the past century, gay marriage, in the Rauch view, is a natural, bottom-up evolution, whose deep social logic is revealed in the multiple ways in which gay couples are already acting and being treated as if married. On this narrative, what is not to like?
The second article is a simple look at the political process.
- How Gay Marriage Became a Constitutional Right.
The author traces the history of the effort to establish marriage as a fundamental right that cannot denied to people based on sexual orientation without a compelling reason to do so. In 1970 it was assumed that this could be done. As of last week, it could not. Again, a chunk of the argument:
In the span of 43 years, the notion had gone from ridiculous to constitutionally mandated. How did that happen?
I put the question to Mary Bonauto, who arguedObergefell before the Supreme Court in April. A Boston-based staff lawyer for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, Bonauto won the Massachusetts case that made the state the first to allow gay couples to wed in 2004. In 1971, she noted, sodomy was a crime in every state, gays were routinely persecuted and barred from public and private employment, and homosexuality was classified as a mental illness. “We were just as right then as we are now,” she said. “But there was a complete lack of understanding of the existence and common humanity of gay people.”
What changed, in other words, wasn’t the Constitution—it was the country. And what changed the country was a movement.
Friday’s decision wasn’t solely or even primarily the work of the lawyers and plaintiffs who brought the case. It was the product of the decades of activism that made the idea of gay marriage seem plausible, desirable, and right.
