Man bites Dog

This is different; a liberal concerned about democracy being eroded by the gay marriage decision.

Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Fellow and Research Director, is concerned that cautious liberal politicians have been unfairly branded as "bigots" for favoring domestic partnership laws, but he is also concerned about democracy:

Another cost is that slow drip-by-drip accretion of power to courts, that steady undermining of the right of people to govern themselves. In California, the deprivation of that right is exquisitely on display, for the compromise the court upset involved decades of negotiation and movement. The nucleus of California's domestic partnership law dates from the late 1970s. Over time, it has grown more generous, by 2006 including all of the rights and obligations of marriage. In 2000, however, the people of California voted overwhelmingly to limit marriage itself to opposite-sex unions. The legislature has twice voted to extend marriage to gay couples--and Governor Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed the bill. The current arrangement, in short, reflects a series of evolving compromises set against the backdrop of a quickly developing social consensus concerning the value and honor of same-sex relationships--a process that the court treated as just so much bother on the way to a self-evident truth. Once upon a time, this bother had a name. We called it democracy.

We may be too far down the road for this to matter. On a philosophy forum site that I was involved in last year, I found it impossible to get the other posters - most of whom were college age - to realize that democracy had an intrinsic value even if it resulted in decisions that were viewed as unfair. I suspect that attitude is shared by most twenty-somethings and a large percentage of older folks.

Hopefully, Wittes message gets some traction.