The California State Supreme Court has ruled 4-3 that there is in the state's constitution, evidently, a right to marry for same sex couples. This decision overrules a law favored by over 60% of the state's citizens that restricts marriage to a man and a woman.
Several observers have noted that there's nothing in the majority's decision which would prevent plural marriage or incest, only a tepid footnote which states that "our nation's culture has considered [those] relationships inimical to the mutually supportive and healthy family relationships promoted by the constitutional right to marry."
Well, has not our nation's culture long considered homosexual marriage to be inimical to healthy family relationships? If the gender of the people entering marriage no longer matters why should the number of people?
In Pennsylvania, where there's an ungoing struggle to pass a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a covenant between one man and one woman, a man testifying before the state senate was grilled by one senator with this question: If two homosexuals are allowed to marry will that harm your marriage to your wife? The witness was temporarily at a loss for a response and the Senator interpreted that as some sort of victory for the gay marriage advocates.
The appropriate answer to the Senator is that the problem is not the effect that opening marriage to same sex couples will have on particular heterosexual unions. The problem is the effect it will have on the institution of marriage in general.
If court decisions like that in California are allowed to stand (California voters will have the opportunity to effectively overturn it in a referendum scheduled for November) they will act as a social acid gradually but inexorably eating away at the institution of marriage and the family, dissolving both. Once any combination of people can marry each other then marriage will come to mean anything at all, and, consequently, nothing at all.
RLC