On Marriage and the State

Glenn Greenwald writes :

But the moral, theological and spiritual questions about marriage are every bit as open and unconstrained as they were before. Just as is true with a whole host of questions on which the State takes no position, private actors are completely free to venerate some marriages and stigmatize others. Churches, synagogues and mosques are free -- as they should be -- to sanction only those marriages which their religious dogma recognizes. Parents are completely free to teach their children that certain marriages are superior and others immoral. And columnists like Douthat are free to argue that the relationships they want to have are not just best for themselves but are, as an objective matter, morally and theologically superior.

They just can't misuse secular law to institutionalize those views or coerce others who don't accept them into having their legal rights restricted based on them. But if they're as right as they claim they are, they shouldn't need to coerce others into acceptance through legal discrimination. Their arguments should prevail on their own. The fact that they believe they will lose the debate without that legal coercion speaks volumes about how confident they actually are in the rightness and persuasiveness of their views

.As always, read the whole thing.