The Media and the Marriage Debates

The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy has just published a fascinating research brief, ” Newspaper Reactions to California Marriage Cases .” How have Americans responded to the May 15 gay-marriage ruling?, it asks, turning to the editorial pages of the twenty largest U.S. newspapers as one major indicator. The results are striking: Of the twelve which published editorials on the matter, only four supported the ruling.

All this doesn’t mean that our journalists have suddenly had a mass moral conversion, but rather, in this case at least, that the media understands America and democracy better than the courts. Or better than the courts care to. The whole brief is well worth perusal, but following are some excerpts. In short, as Robert Miller has been arguing , marriage may best be defended by democracy—which is another way of saying, by the people.

The New York Post , in “Overreach on the Left Coast”: “The ruling was yet another unwise exercise in judicial activism: judges imposing their personal vision of a proper social order on an unwilling electorate.”

The Washington Post , in “Meddling in Gay Marriage”: Pre-1954 racial segregation was “a far cry from the California experience with the rights of same-sex couples . . . . [The judges] engaged in an unnecessary bout of judicial micromanagement by redefining marriage through a novel reading of the state constitution.”

The Wall Street Journal , in “Gay Marriage Returns”: “As with California’s Supreme Court, many of the berobed judiciary take it as their solemn duty to do the people’s thinking for them on the world’s most difficult and divisive social issues. So it was with Roe v. Wade , when the U.S. Supreme Court declared 50 state legislatures irrelevant. The aftermath has been more than 30 years of the abortion wars. California’s Supreme Court is not the law of the land, but its 4-3 ruling . . . explicitly told both the state’s voters and its elected legislatures to get lost.”