Drag (inter) net

Thomas Messner on the Moral Arguments in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

I always feel blessed to meet—seemingly at random—great people in my travels in this great country and this great state. A few weeks back I was fortunate to meet Tom Messner, the author of this fine piece which he wrote for the Heritage Foundation. "A chance meeting, as we say in Middle-Earth." (Or something like that.)

What Tom succeeds in doing here is to demonstrate the selectivity of those defending same-sex marriage by which they either dismiss or "harness" (his word) religious and moral arguments in the debate. So he effectively demonstrates that the question is to which morality do we appeal not do we appeal to morality. He quotes an unlikely source to emphasize this: President Obama.

More pragmatically, everyone has a worldview and everyone inevitably brings that worldview to bear on issues of public policy, including marriage. Therefore, as Barack Obama stated when he was still a U.S. Senator, “[S]ecularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square…. [T]o say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality . . . .”

I think that this is a really good read, and I'm hoping some of those students of law and history who hang out here can comment on it. Roger, Kathleen, Paul Z et al.