The Marriage Amendment

Matt Yglesias has a post on the marriage amendment ban, but I think he gets a little twisted about:

If I'm not mistaken, though, this amendment would actually prevent everyone, everywhere from getting married, not just gay people.

Several of his commenters had what I consider a proper reading of the text. The amendment would allow any state to pass its own statute providing for same-sex marriages, but would prevent any judicial recourse if the state refused to do so. It's simply an effort to remove the issues from the courtroom.

Unfortunately, it also seems to prevent ANY legal challenge to such laws, so it would allow seemingly total discretion to discriminate on any basis.

The other truly strange thing that seems pretty unprecedented is that the amendment proposes to dictate the extent to which state courts can interpret their own state constitutions.

For those who don't know, most state constitutions have many of the same liberty guarantees that the federal constitution has, and have often read them more broadly than the Supreme Court. For example, many state courts overturned their own sodomy laws both before and after Bowers, and many state courts have held the police to higher standards in criminal procedure.

This really is the death of federalism.