My ears were burning, and now I see why.

Joe Hainthaler has a piece over at his place suggesting a compromise on gay marriage - though, re-reading his post several times, I’m not sure exactly what his proposed compromise consists of. Letting the public vote on it? Isn’t that exactly what Brubaker wants to do?

There’s a reason the term “tyranny of the majority” was coined, after all. Can the majority always be counted upon, via the ballot, to embrace minority rights? Was it the ballot that won, say, African-Americans the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or women the right to vote?

It was not. It was, rather, a far-sighted vision by those (like LBJ, who in signing the 1964 Civil Rights legislation knew he was losing the South for a generation, as he did) who realized that the Constitution - be it the Constitution of the United States of the constitution of individual states - is a document that is designed to set forth and protect wide-ranging freedoms.

Those who want to use it to ban gay marriage want, in fact, to use these constitutions to restrict freedoms, to make sure freedom doesn’t roam so widely. You can make an argument that certain amendments already do this - Ron Paul folks may point to the income tax amendment, for example - but the history of the federal Constitution, at least, has been one in which rights have steadily been expanded - the exact opposite of what the “Save marriage from Teh Dreaded Gays!” folks now want.

If you’d taken a poll or permitted people to vote on the 15th Amendment, in 1870 (which prevents governments in the U.S. from prohibiting a citizen from voting based on his or her race, color or “previous condition of servitude” - i.e. slavery) how do you think Americans would have voted? How do you think southerners would have voted? And would those votes then have been correct - because, you know, majority rules?

You want a conservative case against the drive to ban gay marriage, here it is: The government ought not to be defining these things for the ordinary citizen. If we are truly going to limit government power and authority, as conservatives supposedly want to do, why in the world are we expanding it into this, the most personal of subjects?

And so I realize conservatives will say that if we don’t do this, the evil nefarious courts will define marriage in their own evil lib’rul way. So maybe what we need is an actual compromise:

What gays want is not so much title to the term, “marriage” - that’s all semantics. What they want are the legal rights that accompany that legal designation. They want the ability to inherit property from a long-time, loved partner. They want the ability to be covered under an employer’s health insurance. They want visitation rights in the hospital, even if the afflicted’s family doesn’t want them there.

They want the things you and I take for granted. And I tend to think if they had this, the term - the legal and even religious meaning of “marriage,” they’d be willing to forego that

Or, as an e-mailer (not known for his liberalism) suggested today:

As far as I’m concerned, until some recognized authority publishes a dictionary that redefines marriage, there is no issue here. By definition, I may not marry another man… [but] I have absolutely no quarrel with same-sex partners entering an official relationship that gives them all the rights conferred upon us married couples, but, again, by official definition, it may not be termed a “marriage.”

So what, exactly, is the big deal? Why not come up with a new term, put our legal stamp on it and stop expending so much energy (and, of course, taxpayers’ money) on this?

There’s your compromise. Give gays the rights we give to every other citizen, and we can keep the sacred name and the sacred definition.

Unless the goal is explicitly to make sure gays don’t have the same rights as everyone else. In which case, even the sensible compromise is somehow an evil lib’rul trick.