Prop 8: quote of the day

At the Atlantic wire, a round-up on the question of whether allowing gay marriage will lead to polygamy.  Daniel McCarthy has made an observation that I find to be central to the whole issue -- echoing, to some extent, the work of Paul Griffiths I cite in the previous post.

"The question of polygamy is completely separate from that of gay marriage," dissents Daniel McCarthy at The American Conservative:  "One may follow on the tails of the other, but there's no reason, even by the state's peculiar logic, why that must be so. (Certainly plenty of societies have had polygamy without gay marriage.) Conservatives are right to see large implications behind the liberal view of marriage, but they have failed to confront the fact that the liberal view of marriage was already triumphant long before gay marriage appeared on the horizon."  [my emphasis]