Yeah, this'll help

Schwarzenegger tells backers of gay marriage: Don't give up

Today, Schwarzenegger urged backers of gay marriage to follow the lesson he learned as a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were too heavy for him at first. "I learned that you should never ever give up. . . . They should never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done."

The governor's comments came as protesters took to the streets for a fifth day in a row, sometimes marching to Catholic and Mormon churches that supported passage of the ballot measure with public pronouncements and campaign donations.

Bully tactics seem hardly likely to encourage the conservative acceptance of gay marriage that these activists want to see.

The argument which they want to promote in their legal challenge is that "votes can't take away rights." But surely any argument along those lines only encourages the "slippery slope" counterargument that polygamists will argue they have a right to marry too. If anything, the polygamists have a much, much stronger historical and anthropological grounds to argue that polygamy is a "right" deserving of legal recognition in all nations, not just some. If you are a gay person who argues that polygamists do not have a right to a marriage licence, what is it about the idea of gay couples that gives them a "better" right?

The truth is, of course, that it is not a matter of "rights" at all.

As for the argument that preventing gays from marrying is the same as legislating against inter-racial marriage, the best answer to that I have seen was in the First Things blog:

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries state legislatures and courts in the South were prepared to deconstruct and redefine marriage in order to achieve racist goals. For them, race was everything. Similarly, the Supreme Courts of Hawaii and Alaska were also prepared to deconstruct and redefine marriage to advance their vision of social transformation. In Hawaii, the Supreme Court explicitly declared that the State “created” the institution of marriage and thus could redefine it to include persons of the same sex. For them, the only two players in civil society are autonomous, freely-contracting individuals and the state.

Just as the racists tried to redefine marriage for their purposes, thereby distorting its genuine meaning, the Alaskan and Hawaiian courts tried to do the same thing. In both cases the state attempted to redefine marriage to achieve its ideal of an improved society. Both were unjustly tampering with the most crucial pre-political society of all–the unique community of marriage, based upon the union of the two sexes.

Good point, I reckon. I still remain amazed at how quickly the idea of gay marriage has caught on in the liberal West.