Left-activists are disappointed that a gay-marriage measure was repealed on election day in the state of Maine. (I’d much rather refer to it as “the issue of legal recognition for same-sex couples,” but I suppose that is not snappy enough; “gay marriage” sounds as though it was dreamed up by the editor of a sensationalist tabloid newspaper.) At the same time, voters in Washington state approved an expansion of that state’s domestic-partnership law — which however stopped short of referring to these relationships as marriages.
Let me take just a moment to explain as carefully as I can my perspective on matters such as this. I encountered this issue in the aftermath of decades of backlash. There was backlash over the race issue. There was backlash over abortion. I came to feel that it was being demanded of me that I absolutely must entertain the maximum amount of backlash, and must take every opportunity to provoke backlash from voters in “flyover country.” If cleaning up the collateral damage from this backlash became a problem — well, as far as the progressive community was concerned, as far as I could tell, if that was a problem I wanted to take on, I could do so if I wanted to.
Subsequently, we have lived through a number of election cycles in which voting patterns have come to bear little relation to income level. Barack Obama’s “Bittergate” voters, to whom I would have thought progressives would have felt a special responsibility, came to be treated as just another narrow demographic category. Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama presided over presidential administrations that were extremely accommodating to Wall Street interests. We endured the Richard Nixon phenomenon, the George Wallace phenomenon, the Ronald Reagan phenomenon, the “values voters” of 2004, the contemporary “tea party” phenomenon, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, et cetera, ad nauseum.
Bear with me for just a few more moments. There exists an organization called the World Federalist Movement. It advocates world government — or, at the very least, stronger global institutions. As a college instructor, I mentioned to students that it is significant that the organization describes itself as advocating “world federalism.” The point was that, although the institutions being advocated would be global, it would not amount to an oppressive totalitarian structure, because it would incorporate federalism — which means decentralization.
Suppose there were indeed a world government, and every four years everyone around the world went to the polls to elect a president of the world. It could be that the vote in the rest of the world would be so one-sided that the North American vote would turn out to be a “wash.” Under those circumstances, gentle reader, you might not think you are living in much of a democracy. Instead, you might think you were living in occupied territory….
This form of government that we call “democracy” originally was supposed to operate on a small scale. That’s why I felt compelled to tell students that there is a degree of ambiguity attaching even to something like the civil rights movement — described as the “second Reconstruction” by those who were less than completely enthusiastic about it. Whenever you impose a policy by fiat or decree on a continental scale, by a Supreme Court decision or a change in the Democratic Party platform, you run the risk of provoking massive devolutionary pressures. These pressures then will carry implications for absolutely every other thing you attempt to accomplish….
If legal recognition is extended to same-sex couples, I am sure that a great number of people will be helped. However, even in as “blue” a state as Washington, the electorate stopped short of equating these relationships with marriage. Apparently, the people simply do not want to do it, at least not in vast regions of the country. Any recommendation I have to offer with regard to the matter will have to take account of that….