Gay Marriage on the Sunday morning shows

With gay marriage due to be argued before the Supreme Court next week, the Sunday morning talk shows were a showcase for arguments.

On Face the Nation, Tony Robbins, head of the Family Institute, made the case that gay marriage like all social issues should be decided by the states and not the courts. If we were to formalize the argument, it would something like this:

P1:If the Supreme courts rules to require all states perform gay marriage, then the issue of gay marriage will be decided by the courts but not the state.

P2: But gay marriage should not be decided by the courts (nor should any social issue)

C:So the Supreme Court should not rule to require gay marriage.

P1 is pretty close to a tautology, so it is clear the work would have to go into criticizing P2. The natural path here is to say that the case of interracial marriage was an issue that was rightly decided by the courts, and so that P2 is false, or at least has an exception you can march a gay parade through.

 I have not seen any reporter bring up to this point, which conservatives routinely appeal to, is whether they think it was wrong for the courts to decide the issue of interracial marriage.  They would either have to day that the court was wrong to decide the issue of interracial marriage or that sexual orientation is somehow different than racial status. And the only way they could really argue the latter point is to say that sexual orientation is a choice, which is a claim I don’t think conservatives want to hinge the argument on because they know the science and public opinion is against them here. It is disappointing not to see this parallel pressed more.

Speaking of choice, the issue came up on Meet the Press, when Chuck Todd asked the two lawyers who brought the gay rights case to the California courts why, if the court approves of gay marriage they would not have to approve of polygamy. The first lawyer, David Boise, dismissed this as a silly question, a classic attacking the person/prejudicial language strategy, which is not really a response. Then he went on to not answer the question. The other lawyer, Ted Olsen, was much more  clear: sexual orientation is not a choice. There is clear evidence that this is genetic, and there exists no such evidence with polygamy.

Of course, this argument could be responded to by claiming that evolution tells us that males naturally seek out as many partners as possible. But this is an argument for another day