The point isn’t that direct democracy would necessarily lead to injustices, or that representative democracy necessary leads to justice, but that we need to think issues through without paying too much attention to what the majority happens to find fashionable at the moment. Majorities have endorsed all sorts of terrible things over the course of history. Didn’t make them right then. Doesn’t make them right now.

Are you assigning an email address to your name when you post? You need to do that for the gravatar to work (whichever email you used with them when you signed up). [Yep--that's what you needed to do--just went in and fixed these last couple of posts for you.]

For example, even if a majority wanted to prevent Arabs from purchasing health insurance, while legislators might pass such a law, it would be immediately overthrown as unconstitutional. Similarly, a majority could vote to exterminate homeless people and harvest their organs for transplant–but a judge would immediately see that such a policy conflicts with the overarching “metalaw” that all lower laws must conform with–the constitution.

And I think that’s a good thing. Simple democracy is just too immature to promote either justice or social stability. If the will of the people were completely unconstrained, none of us would be safe. If we think persons are of any great moral worth, we have to protect them not only from all enemies–foreign and domestic–but also from the state, and perhaps especially from the arbitrary wishes of their fellow citizens.

So even if a majority believed marriage should be exclusively between heterosexuals, that by itself isn’t reason enough to legally enforce such a restriction. And actually, even if the Constitution were amended to allow such a policy, since we could amend it to say anything we want (like “It’s OK to raise Baptist kids like cattle and harvest THEIR organs for the rest of us”), that by itself isn’t a fully justifying reason either. We have to think through these issues for ourselves, and I think the argument in the original article above shows that we simply don’t have good reason to maintain an arbitrary bias against committed gay citizens who’d like to get married.

P.S. Get yourself a fancy “gravatar” (picture by your name thingy) over at http://en.gravatar.com/

In those cases, either the citizenry’s mistaken about what’s in their best interests (China has nukes too!), or their preferences are illegitimate (rounding up ALL Arabs or precluding gay marriage infringes a minority’s civil rights). I’m not saying representatives always know best, nor that they shouldn’t pay any respect to their electorate’s wishes. I’m just saying that sometimes it’s a good thing there’s a barrier between the mob and legislation–sometimes the merits of representative democracy over direct democracy shine through more clearly than others.

And no need to try and be philosophical–post whatever you like. Poli phil is an applied philosophy, and connecting it to real world politics is the goal of SocratesVotes.

I think you’re right that the same reasons that support legal recognition of same-sex marriage could be used to justify polygamy, arranged marriages and incest, if we’re talking about rational consenting adults. But the same reasons also justify legally recognizing marriages between (or among) any pair (or group) of rational adults, including two-partner heterosexual partnerships.

You’re making a legit philosophical move here–it’s called “reductio ad absurdum” or just “reducing to the absurd”. It’s where you show that a certain line of reasoning would also lead to absurd implications, and thus must be rejected altogether.

However, in this particular case, on reflection, maybe instead of lumping all four practices together and denouncing them all since we presumably don’t like some, maybe we should seriously examine the reasons we have for banning polygamy, arranged marriages, and marriage amongst relatives. If it’s the case that the distinctions amongst them and heterosexual two-person partnerships aren’t all that pressing, then maybe our insistence that they be banned too is just as irrational as our insistence that gay marriage be banned!

So that’s the task for anyone interested in this line of argument–to pick out the relevant differences between these different forms of marriage and show why some should be legally recognized and others should not. Until that’s done, which I’ll leave to an interested reader, I’ll just assume that it’s plausible to think bias against polygamy, arranged marriages and incest (practiced amongst rational, consenting adults, mind you) is just as unfounded as bias against homosexual unions.