TOO FAST?….Mickey Kaus objects to Andrew Sullivan’s claim that New Jersey’s Supreme Court “had no logical option but to apply its equal protection clause to everybody” when it unanimously decided that the state couldn’t deny gay couples the same benefits that it gives to everyone else:
[T]he breathtaking speed with which this sort of radical cultural change has gone from being unmentioned to being a litmus test for all “logical” people is one of the things that worries ordinary voters and turns them into cultural conservatives.
I dunno. The Stonewall riots happened in 1969. Domestic partnership laws started springing up in the 70s and 80s. Sullivan wrote “Here Comes the Groom,” an article for the New Republic that defended gay marriage, in 1989. The Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that the state needed to show a “compelling state interest” in order to continue denying gay people the right to marry. Vermont passed a civil union law in 2000. Currently, we’re in the year 2006.
Is this “breathtaking speed”? It doesn’t seem like it to me, unless you want to make the case that broad social changes literally shouldn’t happen until every generation that objects to them has died off. But where would that leave the Feiler Faster Thesis?
