Stop Gap

I have yet to find the time to get back to the Dreher/Linker debate (and any number of others have weighed in at this point, so the catch-up is rather massive) -- it may wind up being a link dump with brief comments. However, David Link has come up with an interesting post dissecting one of Dreher's commentaries that I recommend.

I do, however, take issue with one of Link's assumptions:

As a gay man who’s worked on this issue for a quarter century now, I am fascinated to watch the debate move fully into the heterosexual world, since they are the 97% of voters who will be charged, in our democracy, with deciding the legal rules that will apply to lesbians and gay men.

Considering the tension between court rulings and right-wing propaganda on the issue of judicial review, I find this statement chilling, as well as essentially thoughtless: the legal rules are already established: the state must provide a rational and compelling reason to withhold a fundamental right from a segment of the populace. The question is whether majorities of the populace, influenced by deceptive and mendacious campaigns by those who don't really believe in our system of government to begin with, are going to be permitted to override those rules. For an interesting series of commentaries on judicial review as it pertains to the Iowa decision, see these posts by Scott Lemieux and Paul Campos, here, here, and here. I like this point in particular:

Almost everybody's conception of democracy (including, I assume, Paul's) entails some protection of individual rights from majorities, but once we assume this claims that judicial review is presumptively undemocratic become almost impossible to sustain, at least in this form. What we should consider the normative ends of democracy is beyond the scope of a single blog post, but certainly it seems to me that if you arrive at a place where arbitrary exclusions of fundamental benefits require less justification than removing such exclusions you're doing something wrong.

Sounds right, yes?