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Topic space viewThe force of proposition’s case is that it is a ‘defense’...
Forcing change in liberal democracies is itself illiberal
The force of proposition’s case is that it is a ‘defense’ of liberalism – allowing all people, no matter who they are, to access rights and freedoms. We clash with this directly, and contend that forcing legislative changes (that bring about marginal benefits to small numbers of society) on a country that is clearly averse to such changes is itself illiberal. And it is precisely those countries in which this debate falls – we are not contesting whether states that already have functioning systems for same-sex marriage should abandon those systems, but whether, in opposition’s words ” bob loblaw”. Liberalism is in essence the preference for self determination at the most personal level. But a state (and the body of laws encapsulated by that state) is merely an abstraction of personal preferences and wills, and hence, in a classical Rousseauian sense (the same beliefs on which US federalism is predicated), a liberal state’s norms, practises, and legislation, must be defined from the bottom up rather than the top down. It is only through determining the rules that bind one at the level of the state that one can truly practise liberal self determination. If we accept proposition’s proposal and force same-sex marriage upon (effectively) all societies, we are in fact incurring a great cost to the very liberal project we are intending to promote and protect, for an as yet unclear benefit. Remember, this is not, as proposition believes, the profound disenfranchising of homosexuals by removing their rights to access economic opportunities or public services and utilities. The reality is that, at present, the majority of people in the ‘contested’ countries of this debate do in fact feel that same-sex marriage should not be allowed (that’s why these countries are the interesting cases). Gallup polls as recent as 2009 show this to be true, and show that in those states which have forced through same-sex marriage legislation against the will of their population have not seen a rapid decrease in resistance to same-sex marriage [[http://www.gallup.com/poll/118378/majority-americans-contine-oppose-gay-marriage.aspx]]. We advocate precisely the attitude of California’s Supreme Court who refused to overturn a public referendum (Prop 8) on homosexual marriages that came down in the negative; it is not the place of legislators or judges to impose, illiberally, legislation on the collective.
