Federal marriage amendment fails
Good to see that the Senate voted down further debate on the marriage amendment. Even those opposed to gay marriage concede that encoding social policy into the U.S. Constitution is a bad idea.
Before the vote, Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) said
I would argue that the future of our country hangs in the balance because the future of marriage hangs in the balance. Isn’t that the ultimate homeland security, standing up and defending marriage?and I’m thinking, wow this guy’s an idiot. Future of our country? Puh-leeze. Not a single effort to extend marriage protections to homosexual couples attempts to take any rights, privileges, or protections away from heterosexual couples, so any characterization of the movement as an "attack" against which a defense must be raised is utterly bogus.
The trend by conservatives to actively worry about what other people are doing in their private lives—whether in the name of "national security" or "defense of society"—is much more potentially damaging to our culture and republic than is extending a few rights and privileges to new groups of people. Looking through history, the societies that attempted to narrowly define what defined "acceptable" and "unacceptable" social roles—e.g. late imperial Rome, mid- to late-shogunate Japan, Revolutionary France, 20th-century totalitarian regimes—had a tendency to crumble or implode. A strength of English and American sociopolitical culture has historically been its tendency to expand the rights of its citizens.