Amendment in Waiting

In yesterday's StarTribune, Katherine Kersten sounded the alarm for a Minnesota marriage protection amendment. Despite the state law defining marriage as between one man and one woman, she sees the judicial happenings in Iowa, where a similar existing state law with strong public support was jettisoned recently by fiat (pending review), as the gathering of forces on our cultural flank.

This is the same argument President Bush (and others) used last year to argue in favor of a federal Marriage Protection Amendment. The failure of an amendment in the US Senate has been mirrored by a similar failure in the Minnesota Senate. I say now what I said then, after the federal amendment failed to even reach the floor of the Senate for a vote:

A constitutional amendment in this case is a pre-emptive prescription for when, not if, an activist judiciary moves to block the [public] sentiment. That the Senate did not even allow the amendment to come to a ... vote underscores the reactive nature of our politics and illustrates that what Chesterton called the medical mistake is alive and well...; insisting on "stating the disease before we find the cure, ... when we must actually find the cure before we find the disease." Oftentimes waiting to act is not a failing, for a host of reasons. Here, however, what is wrong is not the failure to respond with the cure for traditional marriage, but the failure to respond to the "cure" of what is right and good with traditional marriage.

For all the hullabaloo of Minnesota's self-styled "progressivism," we're as reactionary as anyone (everyone?) else.