"NO POLITICS IS LOCAL": Christopher Caldwell

Why else should the enthusiasm of Massachusetts judges and a San Francisco mayor for same-sex marriage be such a big deal to the rest of the country? It is not because the issue pits libertarians against moralists, dionysiacs against prudes. (On the contrary, what worries the skeptical global villager is not that gay marriage will bring moral laxity but that it imposes a rigorous notion of tolerance on those who may not want it.) Two moral orders that worked fine in isolation -- human rights and traditional values -- wind up locked in a death struggle when, thanks to the Internet, television and the pressures of law and politics, each cannot get out of the other's hair. And it is in the national arena that it will be decided which of those orders emerges as the new uniform morality.

Many gay-marriage advocates claim that same-sex marriage should remain a local issue. They argue that once one state recognizes gay marriage, there is little danger that the Constitution's full-faith-and-credit clause will compel other states to follow suit. But this is little more than the signature debating trick of our time: trying to advance one's own effort to enforce national standards in the guise of a modest localism.

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posted by Eve at 10:05 PM VOTE

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