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A collection of positions of religious organizations are obviously going to be focused on theological positions. They don't need slippery slope arguments. This is how you tailor arguments for a religious position piece.
Legal arguments tended toward the most convenient, most obvious legal slippery slope, especially because we have a solid history and case law concerning polygamy that opponents would have to wrestle with. This is how you tailor arguments for a judge.
To build on @ArjinFerman, I think it included, but was even more than "changing the definition of marriage, and if you can do that, what else can you change?" It would be impossible for me to find my old comments on a legal blog from the period, but I had predicted that this general area could continue to be a sore spot, more like abortion and less like interracial marriage. The reason is that it cuts into deep questions of philosophy and science in ways that are difficult to reconcile beyond short-term applications of pure social power.
That is, at the time that interracial marriage rose to prominence, the question was relatively simple (in comparison), and one that was reasonably easily cabined as a purely legal question. Everyone more or less agreed that race was basically a thing. Everyone more or less agreed on what marriage was. They just had to figure out what to do with these things.
On the other hand, gay marriage very much got down to philosophical concepts concerning what is sex, is sexual behavior distinct from an orientation, how is that determined, is it biological or not, etc., as well as questions concerning what marriage is, what its purpose is, why we have it, etc. This is very much like how abortion sparks deep questions about what life is, when it is human, when it has value, etc. Trans questions are likewise in the intersection of very deep and important philosophical questions, and I think they retain the potential to persist as a divide over time.
It is of little surprise to me that as people are getting past the point of peak social power to get a policy outcome, they're realizing that they've actually found themselves in a bit of a philosophical thicket, and some are even wondering whether they let the fervor get the best of them the last time rather than reasoned consideration. We're just digging deeper into the really hard questions. I recall predicting (from my experience taking a queer theory class at the time) that, if anything, we were going to see that the decisions made in the past concerning things like interracial marriage were, not wrong, but woefully shallow, as the philosophical eye would no longer take things like "race" to be more-or-less agreed upon as mostly existing as a thing, and that it might become messier in the future.
I definitely recall arguing (on SSC, even, not just legal blogs) that the philosophical and scientific claims were on dreadful grounds, and that it was going to be a mess, somehow, for them to enshrine, as a matter of Constitutional interpretation, these shaky claims, akin to how Justice Thomas often reminds us that segregation in schools was once justified by social scientists with shaky claims that it would surely enhance learning to be in a cohort of similar looking peers. I don't think those warnings need to be cashed out in ultra-specific predictions of exactly what form the fallout will take. Just a general sense of the "abortion distortion effect" in the legal space, where it seemed to be the case (following Roe/Casey enshrining questionable philosophy buttressed by appeals to science) that the question of abortion precedent mangled far-reaching areas of the law that wouldn't, on their surface, seem to have anything to do with abortion.
Once you walk down the line of enshrining Constitutional interpretation based on lies about science and questionable philosophy, there are going to be bad effects, somewhere, somehow. "Hey, this other claim looks really close to that other lie, and you are absolutely forbidden from acknowledging that it was a lie, so what'r'ya gonna do about it?!" The whole endeavor is built on a rotten premise, and the only question is how many other rotten conclusions will be adopted in service of that rotten premise along the way. It took almost 50 years for Roe to finally be repudiated; will this end up being repudiated at all? Or will it truly be enshrined as complete cultural dogma, irrefutable by science or the lack thereof, free to continue distorting everything that comes close to it? Who knows. No one can predict with any level of granularity. We can't predict which specific offshoots will garner sufficient strained legal analysis and which others will struggle. But I think we can predict that this deep philosophical rift will persist.
Again, to make an analogy to abortion, I think about the fact that Peter Abelard, in the 12th century, has preserved writings on questions that are extremely close to current questions on abortion. That rift is way older than the 50 years from Roe to Dobbs. I can't imagine that fundamental questions about sex, gender, sexuality, identity, nature/nurture, etc., are just going to become suddenly resolved in a stable way super soon. If those fundamental questions are going to stick around, building on a bedrock of questionable philosophy and absolutely horrid "science" seems to almost necessitate some form of weird and bad transient outcomes.
Couldn’t you make up similar deep philosophical questions about race? What counts as a race, is race different from ethnicity? All the same questions about marriage would apply, too.
You’re correct to note they didn’t matter, because the important issue was equal protection under the law. Government guarantees on marriage had to be extended in a race-blind manner. But I’d say the same for gay marriage! The civil right of marriage ought to be extended in a sex-blind manner.
It’s trans issues which are the odd one out. They can get married, can use existing infrastructure. They’re staking claims on social prestige rather than securing some otherwise-inaccessible right.
I mean, I had a whole paragraph immediately before that one:
I even said later:
So sure, nowadays, people are trying to ask more deep philosophical questions about race, along the lines of what you're talking about. But I don't think this was so apparent at the time.
I’m not sure how many of those questions were being asked at the time. My instinct is that there were enough people in the conversation for it to include those topics, if only as a status differentiator.
What I’m trying to say is that the gay marriage debate is more similar to that one. The correct response to a white supremacist trying to lifeguard the gene pool was “no, everyone gets equal protection under the law.” Likewise, the response to a fundamentalist trying to defend marriage was “nope, still equal protection.” This was true whether the opposition was making a practical or philosophical argument.
The trans debate hinges more on definitions than either of those cases.
That could have possibly been a response. Again, impossible to find my old comments from legal blogs back at that time, but I have a clear memory of writing a comment where I considered various possible grounds on which the Court could have ruled in favor of Obergefell. I concluded that the one that would have made the least hash out of the law would have been to just drop EPC and be done with it (this would have required a little bit of effort, because of the societal context, but could have been done relatively simply). But that's not what we got. We got a hash. And it's not surprising that we got a hash, because that's where the state of the discourse was at the time. It wasn't just a simple, clear-cut question without any deep philosophical import. It was absolutely considered to be deeply intertwined with these issues of sex, the nature of sexual behavior/orientation, identity, nature/nurture, and the purpose of marriage. I think the easiest and best evidence of this, if you simply disbelieve my recollection, is to read both the majority and dissenting opinions in Obergefell. In contrast, Loving was simple, to the point, and unanimous. The sole concurrence makes the reasoning even more simple and concrete - racial classifications are just bad, mkay.
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