Persuasion | December 2, 2022 YOU may have heard that the Respect for Marriage Act, which the Senate approved on November 29 and which is overwhelmingly likely to pass the House and be signed into law by President Biden, is a modest measure. After all, it merely tweaks the law to insure against something that probably won’t…
By Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner | New York Times, June 22, 2020 LAST week’s Supreme Court ruling extending employment-discrimination protections to L.G.B.T. Americans — in a 6-to-3 decision, with a conservative justice writing the majority opinion and another conservative, the chief justice, joining it — was a milestone. Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia overjoyed many progressives and…
National Affairs | Summer 2017 IN THE months before the 2016 presidential election, many advocates of gay rights and many advocates of religious liberty were convinced that an undesirable election result could present an existential threat to their ways of life. And in the days following election night, many activists for gay rights feared that…
Politico | June 30, 2015 I AM a gay marriage advocate. So why do I spend so much of my time arguing about polygamy? Opposing the legalization of plural marriage should not be my burden, because gay marriage and polygamy are opposites, not equivalents. By allowing high-status men to hoard wives at the expense of lower-status men,…
The Economist | October 11, 2014 IN SEPTEMBER 1995 eBay was founded, the Unabomber’s manifesto was published, and a memo crossed the desk of the editor of The Economist asking him which of a handful of article ideas were worth pursuing. He circled “gay marriage”. At the time his choice seemed idiosyncratic, to say the…
What accounts for the dramatic shift in favour of same-sex marriage across the United States? The American Review (Australia) | August 2013 THE FALL of 1995 does not really seem all that long ago, does it? To me, it is as vivid as yesterday, yet also ancient as Babylon. I am walking with my father in…
The New Republic | December 12, 2012 DEAR Supreme Court Justices, Last week, you agreed to hear two landmark cases about gay marriage. In the broader of the two cases, which comes out of California, you could establish same-sex marriage nationwide as a matter of constitutional right. This is a ruling that most gay Americans would celebrate…
The Daily | June 3, 2012 WHEN President Obama came out in favor of gay marriage recently, he placed the decision in a Christian framework, invoking the self-sacrifice of Jesus and the Golden Rule. Not surprisingly, some Christians disagreed. “Folks were so determined to make Obama a Christian,” one minister was quoted as saying. “But Christians…
Salon.com | May 15, 2012 IT IS A beautiful spring day in Washington, D.C., around 5 p.m. I am arriving at the august Peterson Institute for International Economics. Today, however, the place is not a think tank but a chapel, and the important words to be uttered are not “trade-weighted exchange rates” but “I do.” My…
The New Republic | May 11, 2012 When he first campaigned for the White House, Barack Obama vowed to be a fierce advocate for gay rights, but it hasn’t always been clear if he intended to keep his promise. Indeed, we gay folks had gotten used to grousing about the President. We noticed the way he…