Thinking about this further, I’d go so far as to state that the courts could (and should) allow gay couples to marry just as soon as interested parties under the old regime waive any distinctions or depart this vale.
The deal-killer for me is that society has initiated a variety of actions under one set of rules, and the judiciary has presumptively declared that the rules should change — without any adjustment of the actions. It’s as if you had previously agreed to sell your kid brother something at 1/10 its real value, and the courts declared that you now had to sell everything you owned at the same discount to anyone who asked.
It’s not that gay relationships don’t deserve consideration. It’s not that the government shouldn’t recognize two persons’ commitment to each other. It isn’t that there haven’t been injustices and that things couldn’t be better. It’s that a bunch of incompetent jurists have decided to wave a magic wand over a state where millions of transactions make sense under one set of facts and change the facts into something else without regard to consequences.
I’d support a reasoned program to identify laws or contracts relating to marriage; determine whether they should be linked to civil marriage, mutual pledging, contract law, some other factor, or even exist in the first place; determine a cost/benefit analysis for re-implementing them in the preferred manner; create an implementation plan; and rationalize these laws or contracts to ensure that social goals are furthered. And I would assert that a social goal is the fostering of long-term, caring relationships between individuals capable of creating a household and supporting such dependents as are appropriate.
But when the alternatives at hand are judicial interference to millions of “deals” already in progress or carving the existing inequities into granite, I’m afraid that I’d be voting for permanence.
