separate but sad
Prop 8 is going to stand because the pro-gay lawyers forgot rule #1 of activism: exploit children.
US Courts only side with plaintiffs who have both rational arguments and sad stories. You can’t say to a judge, “this law makes no sense! Please change it in order to make our society more philosophically coherent.” Procedure requires that the plaintiff show the law injured him. In Perry v. Schwarzenegger David Boies and Ted Olson are presenting a solid rational argument against marriage discrimination, but the sad stories suck.
If the plaintiffs just wanted their relationships to have all the legal characteristics of marriage, they’d have an easy time showing injury. The New York Times recently calculated that the lifetime dollar-cost of being in an unmarried couple can easily run into the hundreds of thousands. But Perry isn’t asking for the legal characteristics of marriage—it’s going for the word marriage.
The only possible way that terminology can injure people is psychologically. In other words, hurting their feelings. So the plaintiffs, middle-aged middle-class partnered homosexuals, say things like:
“I’m not good enough to be married.”
and
“I love kids … To think that you have to protect some children from me, from Jeff, there’s no recovering from that.”
This testimony is awful. It’s reinforcing all the worst stereotypes about the liberal constitutional vision (wimpy) and about gay men (wimpy). (The worst stereotypes about gay women have to do with hair and makeup. I won’t analyze what the lesbian plaintiffs are doing on that front.)
To show that bad terminology hurts people, Boies and Olson shouldn’t have put histrionic grown ups on the stand. Gay teens and children of gay parents suffer more, plus they’re cuter.
