Pennsylvania: Same-Sex Marriage, the Courts, and the People
Robert T. Miller has this post on the First Things web site:
. . . On April 29 of this year, I testified before the Appropriations Committee of the Pennsylvania Senate concerning S.B. 1250, a bill to begin the process to amend the Pennsylvania constitution to provide that “No union other than a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as marriage or the functional equivalent of marriage by the Commonwealth.” Below is an abridged version of that testimony . . .
. . . regardless of the wisdom of constitutionalizing our legal norms about marriage, political and legal conditions are such that these norms are almost certainly going to be constitutionalized in Pennsylvania whether we like it or not . . .
In a democratic society, these great questions of social policy about which reasonable people can and will disagree should not be settled in an authoritarian way. In particular, they cannot be settled by an opinion of a court that purports to contain arguments that determine the issue definitively. Everyone knows that, in reality, there are no such definitive arguments, and so a court’s attempt to settle such an issue in fact settles nothing. In a democratic society, these great questions of social policy can be settled only by the people themselves through democratic procedures—that is, by voting. The majority wins, which contributes to social peace, and the minority has not only the consolation of having had a fair opportunity to make its case but also the possibility of returning and prevailing in a subsequent vote . . .