All One Thing or All the Other

Charles Krauthammer on the two ways that gay marriage is typically defended:

There are two ways to defend gay marriage. Argument A is empathy: One is influenced by gay friends in committed relationships yearning for the fulfillment and acceptance that marriage conveys upon heterosexuals. That’s essentially the case President Obama made when he first announced his change of views.

[...]

Argument B is more uncompromising: You have the right to marry anyone, regardless of gender. The right to “marriage equality” is today’s civil rights, voting rights, and women’s rights — and just as inviolable.

The seeming contradiction with Obama's position:

Problem is, it’s a howling contradiction to leave up to the states an issue Obama now says is a right. And beyond being intellectually untenable, Obama’s embrace of the more hard-line “rights” argument compels him logically to see believers in traditional marriage as purveyors of bigotry. Not a good place for a president to be in an evenly divided national debate that requires the two sides to offer each other a modicum of respect.

Obama now finds himself -- strangely enough -- in the position of Senator Stephen A. Douglas in the 1858 debates between himself and Abraham Lincoln.  In the Dred Scott decision, which was set down in 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney stated that the right to slavery was "expressly affirmed" in the Constitution, which meant that it was now a constitutional right (it fell under the right to property under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment) -- something that could logically not be abridged by popular vote.  Stephen Douglas, however, the champion of popular sovereignty, voiced his support for Dred Scott, which, as Lincoln pointed out, was a seeming contradiction.  Douglas held both that it was up to the people of the territories to decide questions like slavery, a question which Douglas no doubt thought was solvable by democratic forms, and that the right to slavery was now firmly entrenched in the Constitution -- that, in the words of Taney, "the negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect."  These two things couldn't be reconciled with one another.  And neither can Obama's positions.  Ultimately, as Lincoln foresaw, we must be all one thing or all the other.