A reader gently corrects:
Defending federalism, you said of Alabama accepting homosexual marriage, "I feel sure they will one day, just as they eventually dropped slavery." Ahem. Alabama did not "drop" slavery. They fought one of the world's bloodiest wars, with the purpose of enshrining slavery and extending its reach, and they gave up that practice only when they were denied it by an occupying army. There are many arguments for federalism. But slavery is the argument against it. The old south didn't just come around on the issue of slavery, or later on the issue of civil rights. The south might very well still have slaves today, and if not slaves, an apartheid government, had federal soldiers and federal courts not told it otherwise, first after the Civil War, and a second time, a hundred years later, after the early civil rights decisions.