Some have suggested the ambitious push this year to get gay marriage noticed as a national issue backfired: conservative voters turned out en masse to approve constitutional provisions blocking it, and while they were there, touched the screen on behalf of W.

So I was wondering, why is there so much resistance to gay marriage? Recently I heard Sen Rick Santorum on the radio asking -- if we let gays get married, who's next? Bigamists? Shepherds? etc. The slippery slope argument.

I regret to admit the Senator made me think: why do we have an intuitive sense that some groups "deserve" civil rights but that others don't? What informs that intuition? Gay marriage backers don't endorse bigamous marriage. But is that based on anything but the same kind of arbitrary morality that leads others to oppose gay marriage to begin with?

So I arrived at the question that may be so red it's blue: when we award civil rights to groups, are we performing some kind of compensatory calculation?

Hypothetical: let's suppose gays were 15% of the US population. However, for 50 yrs they were concentrated in poor urban neighborhoods where gay gangs created ongoing violence and crime. Murder was a leading cause of death among young gays. Drug abuse and alcoholism were widespread. Gays by far formed the bulk of the prison population.

Gays begin to mobilize for the right to marry. Do you think there'd be more public support? I kinda do.

Another question: why did the Equal Rights Amendment (for women) fail when & how it did? It wasn't a bad idea. But somehow not enough states felt that women were sufficiently disadvantaged at that point to warrant new constitutional rights.

Whereas in the same era, we've seen lots of law passed to give American Indians the right to build casinos. What if the bigamists wanted casinos? No way.

Meanwhile there have been plenty of ethnic & religious minorities who have suffered loads of discrimination and abrogation of civil rights, yet we never got around to creating specific statutory or constitutional protections for them. Often they're the ones who have successfully advanced themselves economically.

I'm hopping around aimlessly now. My point is, what all these trends seem to have in common is that economically disadvantaged groups get preference when it comes to who gets their civil rights expanded or affirmed.

Regardless of what people think about gays or gay marriage, I don't think anyone, me included, believes that gays are economically disadvantaged as a group. Yes, gay couples are economically disadvantaged inasmuch as they don't receive the property benefits & protections of marriage -- but that's not the type of gross economic disparity that civil rights improvements have tried to mitigate. The compensatory intuition that leads us in the direction of other types of civil rights for other groups is not present here.

That doesn't mean gays SHOULDN'T be allowed to marry. I'm in favor of it -- probably simply because I've known plenty of gay couples and it seems logical, fair and respectful.

My question about compensatory rights is really more about the realpolitik of getting this done at this time & in the current socioeconomic milieu.

05 Nov 04