Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

In connection with gay rights, the Hartford Courant is untroubled by the fact that a California court has vetoed the vox populi . Rolling over the legislature, California’s state Supreme Court has decided that the right to marriage is a constitutional right. The Courant heartily agrees. The paper cites a dissent by Justice Marvin R. Baxter, who argued that the justices had “substituted ‘judicial fiat’ for democratic change.” No problem, the Courant argues: “…that's what courts do when people's rights are long denied. In the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court — headed by Californian Earl Warren — jump-started school integration in parts of the country that had been slumbering since the Civil War. “The majority of justices found that marriage is a constitutional right and that the state had no compelling interest in denying that right to same-sex couples. ‘In contrast to earlier times,’ wrote Chief Justice Ronald M. George in the majority ...

No one said during a recent Hartford Courant’s seminar on blogging that the activity was pretty much like a masked ball on the Pequod; masked because most of the commentators on ship operate under pseudonyms, and the Pequod because that fair ship was, among other things, Melville’s metaphor for a jostling, multicultural world. Most of the usual arguments against gay marriage having been answered sufficiently by proponents of gay marriage, I was wondering whether the same defenses used by gays may also be used to check what appears to be a troglodyte resistance to polygamy. So I proposed the question during a blog session at Connecticut Local Politics, one of the most active sites in Connecticut’s burgeoning blog community. A blogger, ctkeith, helpfully suggested that I move the dialogue to my own blog, “where it will never be read”. If it is never read, I see no harm in this. What follows below is the resulting thread on the question proposed. I’ve edited out other comments that do no...