And I didn't say the supreme court needs to step in, I said the federal government needs to step in.

I've been studying this issue (and writing about it) for twelve years. I doubt very much there is an argument on either side I haven't heard.

But this is a red herring. It doesn't matter whether gay marriage is or is not a good thing for the country. (I think it is, but that's irrelevant too.) What matters is if it's protected by the Constitution.

So here's the test: do you think that states can Constitutionally ban interracial marriage? If so, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. But if not, then I submit that you cannot oppose same-sex marriage without being a hypocrite. There is no argument against gay marriage that cannot be applied just as well to interracial marriage.

If you think there is such an argument, I'm listening.

Of course, consistently applied, that should also argue against marriage of straight couples unable to have children (and probably also all the straight couples uninterested in having children). "No marriage after a hysterectomy" is not a position I've encountered.

No, that argument applies (and was in fact applied) to interracial marriages as well: interracial marriages produce undesirable hybrids which have no racial identity and therefore cannot be integrated into society.

> "No marriage after a hysterectomy" is not a position I've encountered.

Of course you haven't, because no one really takes the reproduction argument seriously. When you dig into it, it's just an obvious smokescreen to cover up the bigotry which is at the heart of all opposition to gay marriage.

If there were an actual argument against gay marriage, any demonstrable harm that comes from it, don't you think that the Right would be shouting it from the rooftops? But they aren't. All they're shouting from the rooftops is how horrible it is to ram social change down people's throats. The fact that this is the best argument they can muster is proof that sometimes you have no choice but to ram social change down people's throats, because some people are simply impervious to reason.

My point was not that it's a great argument, devastating to The Gay Agenda. My point was that it is an argument that does not equally apply to interracial marriage. The fact that someone could stack additional assumptions on top of that argument to get an argument that does apply to interracial marriage is irrelevant - you've built a different argument.

And it's absolutely an argument I have heard. Handwavy denial of its existence to serve your rhetoric is poor form. Addressing the argument directly should be easy enough; I touched on why I think it's a poor argument. I agree that those who make it don't consistently apply it - I raised that point explicitly.

Edited to add: To elaborate on why the argument you mentioned against interracial marriage is a different argument in the sense that is important here, one could easily believe that marriage is about biological reproduction, but believe that interracial "hybrids" are not a bad thing, and thus not be inconsistent in accepting interracial marriage but rejecting gay marriage on these grounds.

Cute.

> My point was that it is an argument that does not equally apply to interracial marriage

I didn't say it could be applied equally, I said it could be applied just as well. Those don't mean quite the same thing. To review, the argument as you presented it was:

"marriage is about biological reproduction"

That exact argument (in almost those exact words) can be and in fact was applied to interracial marriage back when that was still a thing. Look at e.g.:

http://www.mediaite.com/online/bet-you-cant-tell-the-differe...

The first quote is "They cannot possibly have any progeny, and such a fact sufficiently justifies [not allowing their marriage]." (State v. Jackson. Missouri, 1883)

As an aside, it looks like the quote is misleadingly truncated in a way that substantively changed the meaning. That said, the full version is still flagrantly factually inaccurate, so the reasoning above remains unchanged.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court, by virtue of the fact that the Union army won the civil war.

If you don't like it, you can always try to get the Fourteenth Amendment repealed. Maybe the Thirteenth too while you're at it. Good luck with that.

I'm afraid the Union Army wasn't fighting for gay rights, so I don't quite see how that applies. Nor do I see the relevance of your curious implication that because I question the appropriateness of the Supreme Court proclaiming gay marriage by fiat, I must also be interested in bringing back slavery. ("Maybe the Thirteenth too while you're at it.")

Of course not. But that is, sadly, not an option. The forces of ignorance and bigotry are too deeply entrenched in the U.S. That is one of the costs of freedom. People are free to be ignorant, and they are free to be bigots. But the government -- neither federal nor state -- does not have that freedom, thank God.

> I'm afraid the Union Army wasn't fighting for gay rights,

No, they were fighting for the union. But then, having won the war and established the nation as a sovereign power, when the fourteenth amendment was duly enacted it became binding on all the states. Sometimes when you fight for things you end up accomplishing more than you set out to do.

I'm not so sure that the states would not have resolved it (Edit: gay marriage, not slavery).

13 years ago, there were 0 US states with legal gay marriage.

6 years ago it was 3.

2 years ago it was 12.

Yesterday, it was 36 states (plus DC, Guam, and a whole bunch of native american tribes). 70% of the US population lived in areas with legal gay marriage.

You might argue that a few states abolished slavery, too, but that was not going to lead to nationwide abolition without war. I think gay marriage would have been difference, because

1. We have much more interstate trade interdependence now, and

2. We have much more personal mobility.

More and more large national companies are including support for same sex couples in their benefits, and when opening new facilities will take into account if the location is friendly to all their employees, including the LGBT ones. I think as soon as one or two of the hold out states lost some big project that would have brought a lot of jobs and money, and the awarding company cited as a reason for picking a neighboring state was that the winning state is more friendly to their LGBT employees, you'd see a lot of the hold out states changing their tune.

Opinions among historians seem to vary, but the impression I've gotten (albeit not with any careful study) has been that the slave states likely would have been extremely slow to abolish slavery, because:

1) the dollar value ascribed to enslaved people represented a huge proportion of the wealth of politically-powerful slave owners; and

2) many non-slave-owning voters in the slave states --- all white males, of course --- aspired to become slave owners and thus tended to sympathize with the interests of slave owners.

I'm reading about the 14th Amendment being something that develops over time, helping people discover new freedoms, and be the very best they can be. It's fluffy stuff.

Like, say, incarceration rates.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/04/t...

Some states have no taxes. Contrast Washington (state) and Oregon. Oregon has no sales tax, but an income tax. Washington has sales tax, but no income tax.

In Portland (which is right on the Washington-Oregon border), I recall a car with the license plate "TAXFREE," which was ambiguous enough that I couldn't figure out if it was referring to the owner being "tax free" (paying no income tax living in Washington) or that the car was "tax free" (the owner paid no sales tax when purchasing it in Oregon).

It's like I tell my liberal friends: if you want to regulate guns, it's very simple: repeal the second amendment.

Yep. Just as the right to marry someone of a different race than you was lurking there but was not discovered until 1967.

Alright, I'll bite: Historically, the second Amendment was meant to to refer to guns being allowed inside of a well-regulated militia. This is accomplished by the states' National Guards. It was not intended to mean that each person gets to have a gun.

This, according to America's Constitution: A Biography by Akhail Reed Amar. Great read, it walks the reader in a novel-type way through each part of the Constitution.

But, we've expanded the 'meaning' of the Constitution several times in ways the founders would have never anticipated. This in like with the 'living document' aspect, and a direct result of our veneration of document that is quite short.

Actually, that is exactly what it was intended to mean. And that's exactly what it does mean according to the Supreme Court. The whole point of the second amendment is that The People do not need permission from the government to have arms. (Don't forget, the country was founded on the basis of a violent revolution against the then-exitisting government!) It's unfortunate the that founders confused the issue by putting some of their rationale into the text of the amendment. But the operative language of the amendment is clear: the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Full stop.

Back then there were technological limits to how much damage one crazy person could do even if they did have a gun (and economic limits too -- guns were expensive. Only the rich could afford them.) It's unfortunate that the founders did not have the prescience to foresee the day when these limits would go away and a single crazy person could do an awful lot of damage. But for better or worse, that's our legacy.

Also, I do not find your dual argument -- that the Founders made their intention clear and also convoluted their intention -- particularly convincing. The Founders made quite a few mistakes when they drafted the Constitution[0], so their veneration as authors of the document seems quite overblown.

[0] Ackerman, Bruce. "The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy"

People can (and do) argue about the founders' intent, and people can and do argue about the consequences of controlling weapons, or failing to do so. But two things are inarguable: 1) the plain text of the amendment, notwithstanding the explanatory preamble, says that "the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed", period, end of story. And 2) the currently operative Supreme Court ruling supports #1.

The real problem with this debate is that both sides are hypocritical. The liberals argue that the 2nd amendment doesn't mean what it plainly says, while conservatives argue that it does mean what it says while tacitly conceding that some limits on personal weaponry (like nukes or ground-to-air missiles) are nonetheless necessary and reasonable. The only real disagreement is over where to draw the line. But until everyone agrees that that's what the argument is really about we're not likely to make any progress.

Hm. I'm a little confused. How can you make a claim about what the intention of the clause was ("Actually, that is exactly what it was intended to mean") without claiming that Founder's intent should be taken into account?

Additionally, it's not pertinent to disclude the "explanator preamble" because, as you say, it's explanatory. The clause and the Amendment itself comes before an Amedment that speaks of quartering troops in peace time. It's clear that the writers intended the clause to be read in the context of militas.

"Equally anachronistically, individual rightists read “the people” to mean atomized private persons, each hunting in his own private Idaho, rather than the citizenry acting collectively. But when the original Constitution spoke of “the people” rather than “persons,” the collective connotation was primary. In the Preamble, “the People” ordained and established the Constitution as public citizens meeting together in conventions and acting in concert, not as private individuals pursuing their respective hobbies.” [..] “Founding history confirms a republican reading of the Second Amendment, whose framers generally envisioned Minutemen bearing guns, not Daniel Boone gunning bears. When we turn to state constitutions, we consistently find arms-bearing and militia clauses intertwined with rules governing standing armies, troop-quartering, martial law, and civilian supremacy. A similar pattern may be seen in the famous English Bill of Rights of 1689, where language concerning the right to arms immediately followed language condemning unauthorized standing armies in peacetime. Individual-rights advocates cannot explain this clear pattern that has everything to do with the military and nothing to do with hunting. Yet states’ rightists also make a hash of these state constitutional provisions, many of which used language very similar to the Second Amendment to affirm rights against state governments.”

Amar, Akhail-Reed. "America's Consitution: A Biography." 736-737

I'm not making any claim about how the clause "should" be read, only pointing out that the current reading of it was decidedly not the intention of the writers themselves. Further, to pull it out of context and make a claim about its meaning 'full stop' is to ignore the nuance of the document as well what those words would have meant when the document was drafted.

It depends on whether the question on the table is, "What did the founders think?" or "Should what the founders thought carry any weight?" The intent is obviously salient to the first question, not necessarily to the second.

> It's clear that the writers intended the clause to be read in the context of militas.

No, it is manifestly unclear. That is the only reason we're arguing about it, because it's unclear.

The question on the table is "What did the Founders think?" I pretented cited, historical evidence of the context of the clause which make clear what the Founders thought. We're arguing about it because you do not find that evidence compelling, and I'm attempting to tease out where you've gotten your facts about this intent. I'll have to dig up the SCOTUS case for the DC handgun ban being overturned (2007?) to see why Roberts believed in an individual right, or believed that it was to be found in the Founder's intent. You appear to be basing yours on our 2015 grammar rules, which doesn't quite cut it if we're going all way back to 1787. Also, keep it mind it was manifestly clear for years before it was challenged in court :)

For example:

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/09/daniel-zimmerman/se...

I'm all for repealing the Second Amendment. I am vehemently opposed to trying to do end-runs around it.

Because the second amendment isn't really taken seriously by anyone, not even the gun nuts. If it were taken seriously, it would become immediately obvious to everyone that it has become horribly dated by the advent of modern weapons technology and it needs to be changed. And then we could have an honest debate about where we ought to draw the line between weapons that people not in the military ought to be allowed to have, because everyone agrees the line needs to be drawn somewhere, even if it's just at WMDs. But no one seems to want to actually have that debate.

check out this article / video: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/texas-guns-poncho-neva... - the "constitution" is the entire rationale that open carriers use to call congresspeople "traitors" and threaten them inside their offices.

I'm not saying they're not idiots, mind you, but you can't go against the will of the majority (dumb as it is) and still wave the "democracy" flag.

On a related note, this is why democracies suck: at least half the people participating are below average.