Thomas Sowell's op-ed about the gay marriage bans

After reading Thomas Sowell's op-ed about the recent election and the success of such measures as Proposition 8 in California (see here for his op-ed), I thought for a while about why I disagreed with him on this issue (see here).

For one thing, marriage can't just be about protecting the ability of a man and a woman to have children. My marriage doesn't include children, so either my husband and I don't deserve to have the protections afforded to married people, or something else must be going on in the institution of marriage to justify protecting people like us (childless by choice) as well as protecting people who want to have children, but can't. I suppose that one could argue that we could always decide to have children, so marriage is there to protect our "children potential" or that we could adopt children--but then, unless a state chooses to ban adoption by lesbians and gay men, the "children potential" of gay marriages is just as possible as our own "children potential" in my marriage.

The other argument--that banning gay marriage is different from banning inter-racial marriage--rests on the assumption, I think, that being a member of a particular race is immutable but that being gay or lesbian (or transgendered) isn't immutable. That argument doesn't work for me, either, based on what I've read about being homosexual and based on my own experiences with my lesbian and gay friends. The whole "where do you draw the line" argument--that allowing gay marriage will lead inexorably to allowing, say, person-canine marriage (yep, I've heard that one) ignores the fact that states limit man-woman marriages on line-drawing reasons all the time. For example, there are limits on marrying under-age opposite-sex people.

My hope is that, in a few short years, this debate will go the way of the debate on inter-racial marriage. In the meantime, though, a whole lot of people whom I love are going through some serious hurt as they listen to some of the rhetoric being lobbed their way. Their hurt is my hurt, too.

The older I get, the more I find myself agreeing with Thomas Sowell

I just read Thomas Sowell's column about the apology that Duke's president gave to the Duke lacrosse team (here). That column linked the Duke President's behavior with Lee Bollinger's choice to allow Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia.

What do these two examples have in common? According to the column, and I'm paraphrasing, it's very easy to go along with the flow of faculty members who express the "popular" views on campus--e.g., that the lacrosse players "must have been" guilty, or that certain controversial speakers (but not others) should be allowed to speak on campus.

I'm not equating what the Duke President did, in joining the faculty's rush to judgment, with what Columbia's President did (allowing Ahmadinejad to speak). What does resonate for me, though, is how groups of faculty members--most of whom are protected by tenure--can get away with bullying behavior, because universities aren't set up to link acts with consequences. Here's what Dr. Sowell said:

The real problem on these and other campuses is that no one has to take responsibility. With the power being in the faculty, administrators can evade responsibility, and trustees are not around enough to exercise the ultimate power that is legally theirs.

Moreover, so long as alumni and other donors keep sending money, there is no price to be paid for caving in to the threats of campus ideologues.

It's not just the traditional administrative game of "it's not me; it's the faculty" going on here. It's also the game of "if you don't give in, I'll make your life as an administrator as miserable as I can." Both games have world-class players at most institutions of higher education. For some other posts on bad behavior in higher education, take a look at Jim Chen's and Jeff Harrison's recent posts on MoneyLaw (here and here).