I was fascinated to read a sensible proposal on the legal recognition of same sex relationships in the New York Times by two authors who actually would like to solve the problem.
Linking federal civil unions to guarantees of religious freedom seems a natural way to give the two sides something they would greatly value while heading off a long-term, take-no-prisoners conflict. That should appeal to cooler heads on both sides, and it also ought to appeal to President Obama, who opposes same-sex marriage but has endorsed federal civil unions. A successful template already exists: laws that protect religious conscience in matters pertaining to abortion. These statutes allow Catholic hospitals to refuse to provide abortions, for example. If religious exemptions can be made to work for as vexed a moral issue as abortion, same-sex marriage should be manageable, once reasonable people of good will put their heads together.
Its at very least a tacit recognition that the big worry among religious constituencies is that gay marriage is just another way to drive them from the public sphere. The more frequently various spokespersons pooh-pooh the idea, the more intense the suspicion becomes--I mean its not like these people never lied to us before. By legitimizing the concerns of religious constituencies, there is at least a possibility of creating sustainable public policy.
It won't happen though.
There are two ways to get things done politically, from the bottom up, or the top down. Prop 8 in California was an excellent demonstration of why the top down approach, while quicker, is nevertheless hard, if not impossible to sustain over the long term. The GLBT offered the carrot of campaign support and the good opinion of the liberal elite to get a judicial fiat giving them what they wanted, but found themselves overthrown by a bottom up approach that rallied public opposition.
Its still a democracy, for a little while more at least, and vox populi, vox dei is still the rule.
While its possible for the GLBT to sign on to a bottom-up approach, its not very likely for any number of reasons.
A political hurricane like this is a great rainmaker, and it is in the interest of too many people to keep on the heat feeding this beast. The political class can feed off this for decades if they play their cards right, so why would they want to resolve the issue? The GLBT has effectively lost control of the issue by allowing it to be yoked with other items of the liberal-Democrat agenda.
Welcome to the byzantine world of party politics, where solving the problem is a bad thing.
