Actually,I suspect just as much of this opposition is based on the view that gays are just another identity group demanding a legaly privaligaed position in society.Public support for the PC caste system is very weak and kept in place only by authoritarian legalisms and fear.
Adopt a color (sex) blind system of any kind and the whole structure collapses.

There is little support because homosexual couples have nearly all the rights & priviledges, under contract law, that married couples have now. The gay marriage initiative is a quest for symbolic recognition. There is not a lot of sympathy for this, because there is no real injustice being remedied.

Robert,that's one point of view,certainly.I beleive tho that many people oppose it because they oppose the spoils system(at least when they're not profiting).

Their mistake is in trying to nationalize the issue. Better would have been to push for a federalist approach-- get non-traditional marriages approved in a few states like Mass., Vermont, Calif. and Utah. Once established, then push the "Full Faith and Credit" aspect by playing up all the various ~injustices~ that have happened in the meat time. Instead of forcing people to accept something they don't want or care, they'd playing off of most American's willingness to "play fair" and their goodness.

I'm telling ya: set up a next-of-kin registry with a bundle of rights and no assumptions about sex in the relationship. Leave marriage to the churches. It's conservative, it's libertarian, it gets the government out of religion, it sidesteps a difficult issue, it allows people to plan for changing lives more easily, it's got everything.

"Better would have been to push for a federalist approach-- get non-traditional marriages approved in a few states....."

Right. But notice that gay marriage has never been "approved" by any state. Never.

Rather, it has been imposed by judges, who "found" clauses in the State Constitutions that had somehow been overlooked for 200 years. IIRC, in Hawaii when gay marriage was put to the people (via an election) it was overwhelmingly rejected.

David,as long as gov't enforces divorce laws,gov't will regulate marriage.

The gay marriage campaign is a form of political theatre being put on by people who tend to like being theatrical. Obviously, if the public were to tell gays -- "Okay, you win, you can have gay marriage, let's just not talk about it anymore -- there would soon be frustration on the part of gays ... until they thought of a new piece of political theatre.

So, here's the big question: What comes next after gay marriage?

Well, Peter Singer, the leading philosopher in Academia, says relationships with animals are okay and Pim Fortuyn, who was the darling of libertarians and anti-immigrationists, advocated for recognizing pedophilia. The latter taboo is obviously in tough shape judging from the way the stars are rallying to Michael Jackson's defense.

In the latest New Republic, Judge Posner expounds on the folly of courts imposing neo-marriage on an unwilling public:

". . . his approach to the question of homosexual marriage is legalistic. Find a precedent (Turner v. Safly, or Zablocki v. Redhail, a case in 1978 that invalidated a law prohibiting a person who was under court order to support minor children to marry without the court's permission), and analogize it to the present case, and use the analogy to put an impossible burden of proof on your opponent, and limit the scope of your rule by rejecting further analogies on however arbitrary a ground, so that the right of a prison inmate to marry is deemed analogous to a right of homosexual marriage but not to a right of polygamous marriage, because the polygamist, unlike the homosexual, is not denied the right to marry the person of his (first) choice.

This is what is called "legal reasoning," and it is hard to take seriously. . .

Judges like to pretend that their decisions are dictated by "logic," or by an authoritative text or precedent, because it downplays the element of judicial discretion, which worries people. The pretense wears particularly thin in constitutional cases about marriage and sex, because the Constitution does not say anything about these subjects, and the framers of the Constitution, and of the major amendments, in particular the Fourteenth Amendment, which is the principal source of constitutional rights against the states, were not thinking about marriage, sex, homosexuality, or related topics when they drafted these founding documents. (Neither were the ratifiers.) Decisions such as the four that I have mentioned, together with the Supreme Court's other well-known sex-related decisions, such as Griswold v. Connecticut (holding that a state cannot forbid married couples to use contraceptives) and Roe v. Wade, are all "political" decisions--not in the narrow Democratic versus Republican sense, but in the sense of being motivated by values not dictated by the orthodox materials of judicial decision-making. Precedent and analogy operate as fig leaves in such cases. . .

I am dubious about interpreting the Constitution to authorize the Supreme Court to make discretionary moral judgments that offend dominant public opinion. Nothing in the Constitution or its history suggests a constitutional right to homosexual marriage. If there is such a right, it will have to be manufactured by the justices out of whole cloth. The exercise of so freewheeling a judicial discretion in the face of adamantly opposed public opinion would be seriously undemocratic. It would be a matter of us judges, us enlightened ones, forcing our sophisticated views on a deeply unwilling population. It would be moral vanguardism. Gerstmann, when he is being tough-minded, inveighs against the Supreme Court's engaging in "sociological freelancing," but that is what he is advocating. . .

Gerstmann is remarkably court-centric for a political scientist, stating that "the merits of same-sex marriage ... is too important an issue for the federal courts to ignore." It could just as well be said that there are issues too important to be left to a committee of lawyers--which is what the Supreme Court is, after all. . ."

"What comes next after gay marriage?"

Well, gay divorce, of course. (Which we've seen before, certainly---e.g., Martina Navratilova---but now it will be "official.")

And if you think gay marriage is theater....

David and Raoul are right.

The most conservative position is to insist on maintaining states rights in this issue.

But one thing is for sure, should it come to a constitutional amendment, gay marriage isn't worth the candle.

M.

When I was practicing, I would, every once in a great while, have to go over to the Probate court which, in Massachusetts, is also the so-called family court (meaning, of course, that it spends most of its time breaking up families). This is no reflection on the probate judges, some of whom are friends and almost all of whom are dedicated to jobs I wouldn't take on a dare, but if justice is being done there, it is coincidental, at best. If it weren't for kids, my attitude towards divorcing couples would be "you got yourself into this mess, get yourself out."