Stephan Kinsella, a libertarian writer and attorney in Houston, TX, comments on the Cato Institute chairman’s same-sex “marriage” paper at the Mises Institute’s Economics Blog:
[I]t seems far-fetched to believe that Jefferson or other Founders believed the Declaration or Constitution to enshrine a right to gay marriage, or to things like sodomy or miscegenation (re sodomy, see my Supreme Confusion, Or, A Libertarian Defense of Affirmative Action). After all, slavery was legal, Jefferson was a slaveowner, and sodomy was not looked on kindly. This is not to justify these odious views, but rather to recognize that the Founders were not libertarian, contra mythologizing. As for the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, again, it seems unlikely the the Framers and ratifiers of that amendment, in the late 1860s, interpreted it so broadly as to protect such rights. After all, if the Equal Protection Clause were so broad, why wouldn’t it have prohibited discrimination against blacks and women in voting? Obviously, it didn’t, since these had to be provided for in subsequent amendments to the Constitution (the 15th and 19th). The Fourteenth Amendment and its Equal Protection Clause were obviously not as broad as some modern libertarian centralists might like. It it was not broad enough to prevent the blatant racial and sexual discrimination in voting law, it’s ludicrous to suggest it was broad enough to cover the very modern idea of gay marriage and to prohibit treating it differently from heterosexual marriage.
Related:
Chairman of the Cato Institute: “The moral and constitutional case for gay marriage”
