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jkit, I basically share your outlook on gay rights - so don't take anything I say as a difference on that; but I don't find it quite as easy as you appear to do to say that a position not supported by (often quite big) majorities of the public should be imposed upon them.

The thing that's both absolutely brilliant and causes absolute nightmares in terms of policy in the US is the Constitution. And let's be frank: nowhere in the constitution is there any mention of specifically enunciated rights for gays and lesbians.  

So aside from the religious prejudices that are increasingly influential in the US there's a very strong philosophical argument that gay rights are unconstitutional.  And this - the "strict constructionist" view of the constitution (ie that absolutely anything not spelt out in the constitution is unconstitutional) is a massive lobby especially in the Republican Party; not so much in the Dems, but I don't actually think that's a particularly good thing for the Dems.

I happen to take the view that the Constitution is a living document; that it establishes principles that apply through changing social norms - after all, the constitution enshrined slavery - and that those founding principles establish the philosophy of rights without needing to spell out every eventual scenario that could not possibly have been foreseen when Washington and Co. started drafting it.

But ultimately, the strict constructionists do have a point: if you want to make something constitutional, amend the constitution.  It's incredibly difficult, but not impossible.  Personally, I think big issues like privacy and indeed sexuality are bringing the need for a new, substantive amendment to the constitution to the fore, but I also can't help but wondering that with such a cynical, splintered, ideologically polarised electorate whether any constitutional amendment on any subject at all is actually likely to get the required backing nowadays.

I think it probably isn't, and that opens up a huge new front between interpretationists and constructionists! 

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Sorry, just on one other aspect of your post that I missed; where you noted that "over 30 states have banned same-sex marriage".

That's true, but I think the problem here is actually going to be with those states - because so long as Massachussetts exists, and is joined by a handful of others (not quite going as far as Mass, but still offering the broad equivalent of civil partnerships) then it is possible for gays and lesbians to marry.

The other issue is that civil partnership is itself a nonsense - I can entirely understand opposition to civil partnership among conservatives because it is an unsatsifactory compromise that cannot stand, and so sooner or later it is a "trojan horse" to marriage. My view is just legislate for marriage if that's what people want to do, but I doubt Jerry Falwell would share that position!

I would be surprised, if the Supreme Court ever gets round to hearing a case on civil partnerships, if it upheld them, because they surely enshrine discrimination just as unfairly (in principle) as homosexuals not being afforded any rights at all. 

After all, the original constitution afforded "other persons" (ie slaves) three fifths of the rights of "free persons" - it seems to me that civil partnerships create a similar class, albeit in an entirely different context and scale.

Again, though, that absurdity was stuck down by an amendment to the constitution, not by the legislature or judiciary ruling it to be unconstitutional (which they obviously couldn't do because it was in the constitution and therefore obviously constitutional!) 

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