1 Gay will make Andrew Sullivan turn on a dime on any issue. He's smart and he know his wordcraft, but take anything he says with a grain of salt. He'll make the exact opposite argument tommorow if it means he can get his gay on.

2 Andrew who?

3 It's not so much the Commerce Clause that's the problem (see Morrison v US) because most would agree that marriage is a non-economic activity. The problem is going to be the Full Faith and Credit Clause (I've always questioned validity of DOMA on those grounds) and more so the Privileges and/or Immunities Clauses in regards to the right to travel.

4 KG's correct, as I've previously noted. http://nooilforpacifists.blogspot.com/2004/03/gay-marriage-debate-real-issue.html http://nooilforpacifists.blogspot.com/2004/03/liberal-professors-invent-bad-law.html

5 You're right that Sully always knew what he wanted, he just can't make a cognizant argument for it.

6 Maybe he goes both ways on the issue. Maybe he's, confused...

7 But if he 'goes both ways' on the issues, doesn't that nullify the whole 'born supporting gay marriage' arguement? ;-)

8 Thanks KG and NOfP. Full Faith and Credit rather than Commerce seem right. I think, however, that you'd agree the core issue involved is the erosion of federalism rather than which specific mechanism is likely to be used to accomplish the deed. I'm not as certain as I once was that "gay marriage" is as detrimental to family structure as I had thought. (Charles Murray has doubts, although John Lott has emerged as the primary proponent of this view.) What makes the problem even tougher to deal with is that the so-called "compromise" (civil union) would probably be even worse news for families. And one can't really use data from Scandinavia because that region is so idiosyncratic (as Murray points out). By the way, lest one buy the argument that legitimizing the "marriage" of two gay parental figures would make much difference to children in "gay homes," only one-half-of-one-percent of all children live in homes with a gay head-of-household. Numerically that may be a large number even though it's a small proportion, but what we're really talking about is a very small effect on a very small proportion of children... balanced against a much larger compound effect on children in homes with a heterosexual head-of-household. The net effect is not, I think, positive... and not even Murray believes that it is. (He just thinks it may be "less bad" than we believe.) It isn't so much that I think there's no argument at all for gay marriage as that the argument is couched in dishonest terms, as though there's no down side. There could, in fact, be a rather catastrophic down side. That's precisely why federalism is so important. If we can't count on federalism to provide us with "laboratories" then about all we can do is block both gay marriage and civil unions.