Except by actively denying people “one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival” (Loving v. Virginia) based solely on their combined genitalia. You may think that the right to marry is trivial and unconsequential, that infringing upon it is no big deal, and it’s perfectly reasonable to expect millions of Americans to wait patiently for years before being granted the equality guaranteed to them by the various constitutions by the benevolent majority. (In much the same way that civil rights were benevolently granted to blacks by whites?) I don’t, however, think that this take on the situation is reasonable at all.
Second, I said nothing about whether the gov’t should dictate to companies who should be covered. I stated that the company’s own policy was to extend benefits to spouses (and I should have added, children of spouses, I guess). Anyways, it was merely a hypothetical. There are many rights, privileges, and obligations that go with legal marriage, and I’m sure there are many possible situations where those rights and obligations might be a matter of crucial importance in people’s lives aside from my hypothetical.
IANAL, but I think I did address this in a previous post. To be more clear:
In a strict sense, you might be offering a false dichotomy, but I don’t think it needs to be broken down like that. It doesn’t have to be “if we don’t do A, then B will certainly happen”. It’s more like “if we don’t do A, there is a likelihood that B will happen”. It all comes down to how likely you think it is.
As some of the real lawyers have pointed out, the constitution is silent on the particular issue of marriage (gay or otherwise). AFAIK, that is also true of state constitutions (except Hawaii?). The MA SC found that its constitution requires gay marriage to be law, it’s certainly reasonable to assume that the SCotUS could make the same argument at the federal level. It might be more difficult to do so on a federal level, but is there **no ** chance of this happening? I don’t think so.
Isn’t it funny how some people think their interpretation of a text is the only valid interpretation, and that everyone else’s interpretation is just window dressing for their personal preferences?
'Cause I find that terribly interesting in these kinds of discussions.
Sorry if I missed such a post. I’ll need to look again.
I “broke it down like that” because some fairly prominent conservative writers HAVE broken it down like that. The way I put it in my OP was practically a quote of what SEEMS to be the popular conservative position. That’s why I asked it the way I did.