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Benjamin Wittes: The wrong way to achieve same-sex marriage
WASHINGTON -
I support same-sex marriage (though not its judicial imposition), Barack Obama does not — at least not publicly. … [But] there are costs to asking courts to so far outflank our political system. … One of these costs is … that slow drip-by-drip accretion of power to courts, that steady undermining of the right of people to govern themselves. In California, the deprivation of that right is exquisitely on display, for the compromise the court upset involved decades of negotiation and movement. … It matters whether we brand the people who want to proceed incrementally as discriminators. It matters whether we take the time to persuade them democratically of what we believe. And it matters if we think so little of them that we ask judges to flip a switch and change the world and damn our fellow citizens if they dislike it. … Read more at brookings.edu/opinions/2008/0520_marriage_wittes.aspx |
