There is no doubt that Dr. Robert George, Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and founder of the American Principles Project, is one of the most articulate spokesmen in our day on the issue of same-sex marriage. Today he penned an outstanding WSJ article on the possibility of the Supreme Court weighing in on Proposition 8 (which restored the historic definition of marriage in CA as the union of husband and wife). Excerpt:
Lawyers challenging traditional marriage laws liken their cause to Loving v. Virginia (which invalidated laws against interracial marriages), insinuating that conjugal-marriage supporters are bigots. This is ludicrous and offensive, and no one should hesitate to say so.
The definition of marriage was not at stake in Loving. Everyone agreed that interracial marriages were marriages. Racists just wanted to ban them as part of the evil regime of white supremacy that the equal protection clause was designed to destroy.
Opponents of racist laws in Loving did not question the idea, deeply embodied in our law and its shaping philosophical tradition, of marriage as a union that takes its distinctive character from being founded, unlike other friendships, on bodily unity of the kind that sometimes generates new life. This unity is why marriage, in our legal tradition, is consummated only by acts that are generative in kind. Such acts unite husband and wife at the most fundamental level and thus legally consummate marriage whether or not they are generative in effect, and even when conception is not sought.
Read the whole thing.