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Read other letters about this article
Sorry for the longness. This is an example of what I was talking about.
What Miles wrote:
First, the judge delivered a surprising attack on the heterosexual agenda: Straight people, he said, are really bad at marriage. Opposite-sex relationships, wrote the judge, are often "casual" or temporary. (Wasn't that what right-wing frothers used to say about queers?) Thus, wayward, irresponsible, sexually promiscuous straight people need the legal benefits of marriage as inducements (read: special prizes nobody else gets) to lure them into "solemn, long-term commitments" to each other, so that they can care responsibly for children.
What Smith wrote:
First, the Legislature could rationally decide that, for the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability, in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships. Heterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not. Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the Legislature could find that this will continue to be true. The Legislature could also find that such relationships are all too often casual or temporary. It could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement -- in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits -- to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other.
It goes back to the test used to decide the case. The judge is saying that, using the example above, the legislature could rationally deny homosexuals the right to marry, and therefore the Domestic Relations Law is constitutional. (Remember, the plaintiffs, in the judge's eyes, failed to prove that the argument was irrational.) That is the heart of the ruling, and a little less broad than Miles makes it out to be.
The ruling even states this:
We hold, in sum, that the Domestic Relations Law's limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples is not unconstitutional. We emphasize once again that we are deciding only this constitutional question. It is not for us to say whether same-sex marriage is right or wrong.
