More on Gay and Interracial Marriages:

At Freespace, Tim has an excellent post on gay marriage and interracial couplings that is in line with what I’ve been writing on this issue.

He references a National Review Online article that warns us that the Supreme Court could find a right to gay marriage under the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the 14th Amendment and use Loving v. Virginia as precedent. Gay marriage advocates argue that one case does follow the other. Traditionalists argue the opposite, stating we can limit Loving and distinguish between the two issues. Using legal reasoning, it’s possible to go either way.

But there’s another way of looking at it. If the Court does extend Loving to gay marriage—Loving led us down a slippery slope to gay marriage. If this happens, will conservatives who buy and large support Loving, blame that decision, or blame the Court for wrongfully using it to justify gay marriage? In other words, if the Supreme Court does recognize gay marriage and subsequently uses that decision to justify a right to polygamous marriage, blaming the gay marriage decision for polygamy is no different than blaming Loving for the gay marriage decision. If gay marriage is recognized, it does not follow that we must recognize polygamy any more than recognizing interracial marriages demands that we recognize gay ones. Courts, exercising legal reasoning, can limit their decisions. The focus today is on gay marriage. Yesterday it was on interracial couplings. And tomorrow, it may very well be on polygamy. We’ll cross the polygamy bridge when we come to it.