Jared at the ODE reports on the increasingly depressing same-sex marriage debate:

College Republicans Chairman Jarrett White said his group is “100 percent behind the idea that marriage is between a man and a woman,” and the group supports a Constitutional amendment. White said marriage is a sacred union created by God and the issue of same-sex marriage should be a federal issue and not left to the states.

“You can take if [sic] from the biggest states’-rights guy on this campus,” he said. “It should be a federal issue. It should all be the same.”

Manfully suppressing my initial reaction to this quote – which, as Tim pointed out, may well have been libellous – let me be content with a statement of fact: Jarrett White is manifestly not the biggest states’-rights guy on this campus.

This is relevant, as far as the legal discussion goes. This is also good. However, the next problem – at least from where I’m sitting – comes at the state level, where some 37 chunks of the Union have already passed constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage.

Eugene Volokh fears that the FMA would preempt (what he sees as) the likely move by state legislatures towards liberalizing marriage laws over the next few decades. Do the state constitutional amendments have the same potential impact? Can the state amendments themselves be more easily amended, or what?

Worth noting that Oregon does not currently have one of these amendments: but I rather fear that the charming Oregon Citizens Alliance will have something to say on the matter once they return to Earth orbit for another brief fly-by.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2004 at 15:48 by olly and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.