Krauthammer now "ambivalent" about gay marriage

Will wonders never cease?

Charles Krauthammer actually manages to express compassion for gay men and women who want to get married. Sadly, he reverts right back to conservative delusion at the end, but his declaration of "studied ambivalence" toward same-sex marriage is a manifestation of more human kindness than I have come to expect from him.

I'm not one of those who see gay marriage or polygamy as a threat to, or assault on, traditional marriage. The assault came from within. Marriage has needed no help in managing its own long, slow suicide, thank you. Astronomical rates of divorce and of single parenthood (the deliberate creation of fatherless families) existed before there was a single gay marriage or any talk of sanctioning polygamy. The minting of these new forms of marriage is a symptom of our culture's contemporary radical individualism -- as is the decline of traditional marriage -- and not its cause.

As for gay marriage, I've come to a studied ambivalence. I think it is a mistake for society to make this ultimate declaration of indifference between gay and straight life, if only for reasons of pedagogy. On the other hand, I have gay friends and feel the pain of their inability to have the same level of social approbation and confirmation of their relationship with a loved one that I'm not about to go to anyone's barricade to deny them that. It is critical, however, that any such fundamental change in the very definition of marriage be enacted democratically and not (as in the disastrous case of abortion) by judicial fiat.

Krauthammer loses me at the end with his insistence that this change in social policy "be enacted democratically" rather than as a result of judicial action. This is the same argument used to oppose civil rights for racial minorities at various times in our nation's history. There are those who contend with a straight face that the voters and legislators of Mississippi, Louisiana and other corners of Dixie, rather than "activist judges" on the federal bench, should have been the ones to grant equal rights to black people. Of course, if those judges had not taken it upon themselves to usurp the will of the good people of Louisiana and Mississippi, my son still would not have the right to go to school with white children. I would still have to take an IQ test and pay a poll tax in order to vote, assuming I had the right to vote at all.

Bigotry has to be struck down by any means necessary.