As the calendar peels away before the election, Virginians still support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages by a wide margin. The latest poll, by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, shows Virginians favoring the amendment 52 percent to 42 percent. That represents a shift of four percentage points against the amendment since late July, but amendment foes don’t appear to have enough momentum to change the final result materially.
I guess I’ll be on the losing side again. My inclination is to oppose the amendment. Here’s why: A constitutional amendment offers no flexibility. If you don’t like the way things turn out, there’s no easy way to fix it. You can’t go, “Oh, we didn’t think of that, we’ll just patch it up with a piece of legislation next year.” The process of amending the state constitution is simply too cumbersome, and rightfully so, to permit fine tuning.
I’m not a constitutional scholar, so I cannot make an intelligent judgment on what the amendment means for the legal rights of gays. Some experts say one thing, some say another. The only thing we know with any certainty is that people will file lawsuits, that judges will rule on them, that the rulings will be appealed, and that the state Supreme Court has the final say-so. If we don’t like the rulings, that’s too bad. We’re stuck.
Like many who support the amendment, I feel that traditional values, many of which I share, are under siege in our society today. But you protect those values by winning in the marketplace of ideas and winning in the electoral process, not by trying to enshrine them in the state constitution,. I’m still open to new arguments, but if the election were today, there’s an 80 percent chance I would vote no.