— Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history at The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, WA & wrote “Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage” (Viking, 2006)

If we are going to have to fight anyway, why not fight for what we fully deserve? In fact, authenticity and leadership actually help politicians guide the public to the right result. Consider: In Vermont, where legislators created civil union rather than ending marriage discrimination, a right-wing firestorm followed anyway, with hateful attack ads across the state, primary challenges, and electoral turbulence. By contrast, in Massachusetts, every single legislator who supported marriage equality won reelection, and some of the loudest opponents were defeated, because the public had a chance to see leadership, hear the case, and, most importantly, see with their own eyes that when same-sex couples married, they didn’t use up the marriage licenses and the sky didn’t fall.

Q. Isn’t marriage a religious matter?
A. The issue before the government is equality in the right to marry. Furthermore, any given faith should, and will, retain the right to decide which couples it will or will not marry in its own religious rites.

Q. Isn’t marriage about procreation?
A. People have many reasons for wanting to marry—love, commitment, security—and there has never been a legal requirement that married couples have children (in fact many married heterosexual couples never do, while many gay parents want the freedom to marry precisely because they are raising kids and want to do so within marriage).

Q. What about the children of gay marriages? Won’t they be confused at best?
A. Those who argue for discrimination in marriage are harming children more by denying them the best legal protections and economic safety-net that marriage would bring their family. All children should enjoy the tangible and intangible benefits that marriage can bring.

Q. Why not call same-sex unions something other than “marriages”?
A. Only marriage can assure full equality under the law, as well as full security and protection for families. Creating a “parallel, non-marriage marital status” falls far short of the full equal rights the Constitution guarantees to all Americans, including gay Americans. There is no other system of legal protection; civil unions are currently available only in a few states and legal protection for families should not “sputter in and out like cell phone service.”

Or, to put it another way: The Supreme Court having extruded a “privacy right” from the “aura of rights surrounding the constitution” that it then used to void statutory state laws governing sexual behavior, what is to prevent the same court from applying the same privacy rights to legalize, so to speak, the sexual behaviors of polygamists?

A comprehensive answer to 34 and 35 would take me very far from the thread I am developing. Briefly, let me say that correct constitutional interpretation is no longer a bar to the pretensions of the Supreme Court. Any court that deduces rights not specifically mentioned in the constitution – a right to privacy, for instance – from the “aura of rights surrounding the constitution” has effectively freed itself from contextual interpretation. And that means that a previous commentator may be right in supposing that an extension of rights to groups not covered in the plain text of statutory or constitutional law is purely a matter of will: “All this long winded consitutional talk is moot. It comes down to the will of the people.” I have little doubt that a court liberated from textual analysis is capable of deducing a “right” to polygamy from the aura surrounding a grapefruit.

“One more time, Using religion to change marriage would go against everything we know to be true about a civil contract.”

No one is proposing “using religion to change marriage.” In fact, no changes are proposed. In a civil society that recognizes polygamy – as it does in law recognize more traditional arrangements – religion would not be used to change marriage. Presently, polygamy is recognized in much of the world as a traditional marriage arrangement, and the civil law protects and does not change it. The same holds true with traditional marriage. The law here in the United States recognizes traditional marriage ALSO as a civil right. Indeed, the present legislation before the Connecticut legislature contemplates extending the same civil protections – marriage is a civil right but a religious privilege – to the less traditional marital arrangements aproved by gay couples. I am asking you to tell me why the same protections cannot be extended to those who practice polygamy. The extension of the protections of civil law to polygamous arrangements very likely will produce here in the United States a bumper crop of non-religious polygamists. What about them? Suppose a gay couple wishes to engage in a polygamous marriage in which there would be no sex differences; would you allow that? By the way, believe me – Delucca would not favor polygamous marriage. He might be able to develop a reasonable argument against my proposal, but it would be one, I fear, that would not find favor in your eyes.

I think there are more than a few people that feel the timing of the gay bill being proposed has a lot to do with the CJ position. This will never pass on its own and will at some point go to the courts. Lawlor and McDonald might have felt that they needed Sullivan and Zarella out of the way if there was any chance of it passing a court challange (but who’s to say how they, Sullivan and Zarella, would have voted).

While everyone else in Hartford was quiet, these two and the Courant carried on as if it was the end of the world. They twisted a nothing into something. Somehow, Dewy, Cheatem and Howe JUST HAPPENED to be on their side and the rest is history. Adam, given your other comments and your obvious position on this issue, I am shocked you would ask the question you are asking— as you just screwing with me?

I think the supporters of this bill are really reaching on the consitutional question. The consitution protects sex as in man and woman but I don’t see anything or even suggesting the he’n and he’n and she’n and she’n protection being claimed. All this long winded consitutional talk is moot. It comes down to the will of the people and I can’t believe the people of CT will stand by and support this mess. I don’t know much but, in my humble opinion, he’n and he’n and she’n and she’n is far worse than anything that happened at the court. Just think— he’n and he’n—- holding a decision— as Lewis Black would say–” don’t think about that for more than a second or your head will explode”

According to most feminists, the history of marriage is a history of males dominating females. Surely we can agree that, at least in Western society, this is no longer the case. In most instances, there is a rough equality in marriages, as in all else. Going forward, why should the same not be true in polygamous marriages? In a perfectly equalitarian society women, in polygamous marriages, would be able to have as many or few husbands as men would have wives. An equalitarian could have no objection to that. Besides, my own personal objections or approval are unimportant; so are yours. The question is: If you don’t like polygamy and wish to prevent your sons and daughters from engaging in it, what are the laws and social conventions you may appeal to in order to effect your aim? According to you, those laws and social convention must not offend the principle of equality. Beyond this, I’m not clear what they might be.

What amazes me are the 39 posted comments that follow. We need to get Don Pesci a day job so he can focus on something other than polygamy.

Passage of the marriage equality bill would indicate that lesbians and gay men are social equals to nongays. Even more signifiant, same-sex marriage will imply that the SEXES are deeply and fundamentally equal. This brings to mind the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention passage of 2 closely linked rules: that a wife must “submit” to her husband and that homosexuality must be opposed by every possible means.

EJ Graff reminds us that these two ideas are “twin sides of the same coin. If a woman marries another woman, who’s in charge? Restricting marriage to husband/wife pairs is an essential symbol of MALE supremacy–just as restricting marriage to one race was an essential symbol of WHITE supremacy. . . .Same-sex marriage reveals that marriage need not be hierarchial at all, that biology is not destiny, that marriage can be about not obedience but love.”

As to the history of polygamy, it has been an instrument of male domination–one husband and multiple wives. The inclusion of same-sex couples within our marriage framework is a step forward for those who value egalitarinism in our state’s institutions. I would hope that Mr. Pesci can see the difference between “domination” and “egalitarianism.”

I note that Stanley Kurtz is cited in a comment above. Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. It was established in 1976 to “apply the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy.” My experience with the writings of Stanley Kurtz is that he comes from that wing of the Judeo-Christian tradition that allies itself with the Empire rather than the Hebrew prophets. He would do well to read John Dominic Crossan’s new book God & Empire.

Christian theologian Walter Wink edited an evenhanded book on gay issues within religion. It is titled Homosexuality and the Christian Faith.

More recently Professor David Myers co-authored the book What God Has Joined Together? A Christian Case for Gay Marriage. He writes from his mid-western campus in Michigan and from an evangelical perspective. He supports the move toward marriage equality.

So I suggest that social commenter Stanley Kurtz is one voice that claims Judeo-Christian roots. A focused analysis reveals, however, that his position is built on premises of hierarchy and power, rather than love and commitment.

Your post #27 last night says it all for me as well…….. I have no interest in weighing in with my thoughts on gay marriage, civil unions, or any other of these social issues. Certainly attitudes on issues like these continue to evolve over time. What was or was not acceptable to our parents/grandparents 25/50 years ago, probably will not be how our kids view things now or in 25 years. I can easily live with that. We are who we are.

However your last comment that “Rome is burning” is close to my feelings as well. It just amazes me that so many here in CT can get so focused on these social issues, they cannot see this place going bankrupt.

We urgently need to get our fiscal house in order here. Clearly you see and understand the same issues I see. Maybe in 25 years we will have all our social issues solved, and will have come up with a new economy that allows for endless continued spending with no results, but somehow problems get solved. Sounds a bit like Star Trek to me. I am however, shall we say, not convinced.

Our General Assembly and Governor(s) must be forced into being honest about the fiscal mess they have created, and still are creating here, and are silently leaving to our kids to deal with. They can only do this if we continue to allow them to.

I know when I was younger I didn’t care, fixing all the social problems was what all us college age people had as a first priority. Now that I am older, man how I wish I paid more attention to all the problems, and how they were being addressed.

I guess simply put what was important to me when I didn’t have kids, became far more important after I had them. I guess the good news is we are really out of money, in debt beyond imagination, and have very few places left to find the money to pay the bills. Sooner or later that will get everyone’s attention. I hope in time to allow my kids to be able to afford to live here if they so chose. I hope before Rome has completly burned.

Can we quote you on that?

Not so sure that civil rights have NOTHING to do with religion since religion is one of the counsitutional rights mentioned in the US constitution. But you can have the last word. Glad you’re down with polygamy.

I clearly see sex in that Amendment, I don’t see any mention of polygamists, or those who engage in incest.

The same rights that are being denied to gays.