Let the People Vote!

The latest reports say that the vote in the New York Senate on whether to legalize same-sex marriage is resting in the hands of just two Republicans. As the National Organization for Marriage blogged, hundreds have gathered on the steps of City Hall, chanting, "Let the People Vote!" NOM supports a referendum for the citizens of New York and letting the legislature do what the people decide.

This is the only reasonable alternative. Professor Nancy Cott, one of plaintiffs' experts in the Proposition 8 case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, testified that the social meaning of marriage in society is defined by "how the public views marriage." Moreover, Cott also agreed that "the law very definitely has an impact on the social meaning of marriage."

Any law legalizing same-sex marriage, in the words of Ian Robinson, would "strip marriage of its deep meaning as a symbol of the male-female union that it is quintessentially a part of [life] on this planet, and to pare it down to the status of a civil union, a merely legal arrangement." In other words, laws allowing same-sex marriage would remove a very important social meaning of marriage.

The people of New York, and any other jurisdiction for that matter, must be allowed to vote on the legal definition of marriage. First, it only makes sense that the same people who define the social meaning of marriage should be allowed to define the legal meaning of marriage as well. Second, we know that changing the legal meaning of marriage will, in turn, change the social meaning of marriage. And the people might not want that to happen.