A Question Of Equality

Dreher pushes this article by law professor Paul Campos, a marriage equality proponent who found the Iowa decision distasteful:

 ...the court said it was interpreting the equal-protection clause of the Iowa constitution, which, like the U.S. Constitution, guarantees the state’s citizens that they will be treated equally by the law. Yet, just as in the case of the federal constitution, this phrase is, as a practical matter, meaningless. It’s meaningless because a legal directive telling the government to treat people equally in and of itself decides nothing...

That’s because the concept of equal treatment requires treating things that are sufficiently alike in the same waybut that concept tells you nothing about whether the things you’re analyzing (such as opposite-sex and same-sex marriage) are sufficiently alike.
It should be unnecessary to point out that the question of whether same-sex unions are sufficiently like opposite-sex marriages to merit equal treatment is a political and moral question, which lacks any specifically legal content whatsoever.

But that is why so many of us who support marriage equality have spent years providing reasons for the similarity between the relationships now accorded the status of civil marriage and those that are not. We have discussed the question of procreation, of mutual financial support, of longevity, and the variety of arrangements which now come under the same civil rubric, among a whole variety of topics. These are arguments - and the Iowa court went over them in great detail and with great care. You can try and counter these arguments, but to dismiss them as meaningless is bizarre.

I might also add that it's perfectly clear that Rod has never actually read Virtually Normal, since so many of his objections were dealt with at great length in that book, and he seems oblivious to them. Could he do me a favor and give it a try?