It leads me to believe that the self-professed centrist is actually a thinly-disguised leftist ideologue. But then, maybe I've been spending too much time with Jonah Goldberg's new book.

If you hadn't already copped to being a Cardinals fan, this comment would have given it away. Of all the canards spoken of Cubs fans, this is the most knuckleheaded. EVERY fan wants his team to win, fer cryin' out loud. Cubs fans simply choose to support their team win or lose (mostly lose). There's a word for that: it's called "loyalty".

Yes, I think we're on the same page now. You've stated quite clearly the idea I was trying to get at. And I couldn't agree more about the 200 word limit. I'm in favor and all, but I know it causes me to sacrifice clarity for brevity far too often, especially when I'm attempting to quote the essence of someone else's post without seeming to truncate it unfairly.

Maybe we could arrange with the suits to give us an extra 50-100 words, to be used only when quoting.

Think there's much chance of either thing being seriously proposed? Can you imagine what would happen to conservatives who proposed the repeal of no-fault divorce? "It's a war on women!" "Conservatives want to permanently imprison women in abusive relationships with no possibility of escape!" "Women as chattel: the Republican ideal!"

Great heavens, the attack ads write themselves… 

Well, similar arguments were made regarding the liberalization of the divorce laws. Some warned of the dire consequences of treating marriage so lightly. Others said nonsense, marriage will be just fine, if not stronger, and anyway people have a right to chuck away miserable, loveless relationships. Fair give-and-take on both sides, but it's hard to argue that easy divorce has done marriage much good.

But leave it aside. You're right, I don't have the "empirical evidence" you demand. I'm merely making an argument from shared experience and human nature. I'm pessimistic, however; I suspect, once we've finished kicking away one of the few remaining pillars holding up our tottering cultural inheritance, we'll get all the empirical evidence you could want. Let's hope you're dead right and I'm dead wrong, since we won't get a second chance on this one.

@Astonishing: Brother, I feel your pain.

No, I don't think that actually, but it typifies the oversimplification of opposing arguments that has made this discussion -- here as elsewhere -- so fruitless and wearisome. Since you don't directly address the substance of my post, may I take it that the distinction between the particular instance (a marriage) and the general principle (marriage as an institution) has finally sunk in…?

Apparently not. You still don't get it. It's not about you and me and people who think like we do. The whole point of the SSM movement is to raise a few consecutive generations of people who don't think at all like we do. Marriage as we knew it will be gone, and you and I won't have a thing to say about it. But our posterity will have to live amongst the ruins of an institution we couldn't be bothered to preserve.

Perhaps you have trouble accepting the argument because you continually fail to understand it, as made obvious by the way you continually misrepresent it.

No one is making the case that recognition of homosexual "marriage" will cause already-married heterosexuals to suddenly run out and void their marriages.

As I should have thought would be obvious by now, the real argument against such recognition is about what it will do to society over time, as one generation after another is brought up to believe that heterosexual marriage is just one lifestyle choice among many, no better or worse than lots of other arrangements and offering no particular benefit to our society.

Tommy, if you get nothing else from this thread, please stop accusing us of arguing that homosexual marriage will cause you to stop loving your wife. Nobody said it; nobody believes it. It's a silly distraction.

This, I think, is where you make your fundamental error, i.e., failing to understand which comes first, the institution of marriage or governmental recognition of it. Defenders of traditional marriage are not "appealing to the government for approval"; they are insisting that government refrain from radically redefining an institution that pre-dates government, sits in a superior position to government, and is essential to the health of our society, in the ways Ms. Charen very eloquently described.

This is difficult to answer, since President Obama and sincerity are, as near as I can tell, not even nodding acquaintances. But look at it this way: if he is sincere now, then he certainly wasn't sincere in his earlier pronouncements in support of traditional marriage. Naturally he wants to have it both ways; on this issue, he always has.

One way or the other, I would have to answer your question with a definite "No".

What a despicably innocuous way of putting it. Like "finding out" you're lactose intolerant or "finding out" your grandma had webbed feet. As though she stumbled on the fact of her pregnancy without any idea how she ended up in such a predicament.

When we anti-abortion types accuse those on the other side of being "pro-abortion", this whole depressing story is pretty much what we have in mind. Michael, thanks for posting this. Now please tell me how I can un-read and un-remember it.

Sympathetic though I am to the sentiment, "He's disqualified for the job by the fact that he wants it" is not an electoral or a governing strategy. Somebody is going to win the presidential election. By definition, yes, he will be a statist because he is a politician, and "we" (speaking collectively) elect our politicians to DO stuff.

On this, Rob Long has it exactly right: there just is no majority constituency yet for politicians who want to shrink the real size of the federal government. We have to create the constituency; we the people have to, as Milton Friedman put it, make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

One vote, for one "anti-statist", in one federal election at a time is a formula for failure.

I just happen to be in favor of the Child Tax Credit. (I realize you disagree.) And in this instance, we would get the two-fer of also officially recognizing conception as the beginning of human life.

Hey, I've been there. Many's the time I've typed out a great big post in a fit of pique, then read it through a few times, realized I wasn't doing anybody any good, and sheepishly hit the delete key.

Yeh. That's why they left. Mm-hm. Uncomfortable. That must have been it.

Um, no. My post, for example, addresses the likelihood of this silly idea ever being seriously proposed, by Democrats or anybody else. I say fat chance. You disagree, apparently? You think there is a real chance that liberals in Congress would propose expanding the Child Tax Credit to cover children still in the womb?

Gee, I hope you're right.

Dear me, we're being a wee bit touchy, aren't we? Meant my post in a friendly spirit; sorry I failed to make that clear.