THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF HUMAN TRADITION…

A commenter writes:

...but on gay marriage he is an extremist, writing a strange newspeak where "pro-marriage" means "pro-gay marriage" and anyone reluctant to overturn thousands of years of human tradition is hounded as a dark-age homophobic bigot......but on [interracial] marriage he is an extremist, writing a strange newspeak where "pro-marriage" means "pro-[interracial] marriage" and anyone reluctant to overturn thousands of years of human tradition is hounded as a dark-age [racist]...

Clever but not valid, because the ban on interracial marriage was a local phenomenon in time and space, and never represented thousands of years of human tradition. Race is also a social construct in a way that homosexuality is not. I like to illustrate this with a story from my childhood. In 4th grade I had two friends who were black. I think. The thing is, I don’t remember. I remember that Jason was tall and cool but treated me nice, and I was jealous because Jenn Hull was in love with him, and that Ticora and I were rivals for smartest kid and in choir. I remember Ticora and I were in a class where we read a Kurt Vonnegut story together. I’m sure Jason and Ticora had somewhat darker complexions than I did. But were they black, or Asian, or Mexican, or Arab? I don’t remember. I hadn’t been trained to assign those categories to people based on arbitrary physical features like skin color. You can’t have an analog for that in the case of gays.

Mickey Kaus, though, provides a more persuasive precedent (relevant remark in boldface):

Kerry was puncturing the "hypocrisy" of Bush's position, as some Kerry defenders claim, only if the sole reason to oppose gay marriage is homophobia. I support the idea of experimenting with gay marriage, but surely it's possible to be a non-bigot and be reluctant to immediately tinker with such a venerable social institution (even if modern monogamous marriage is itself a tinkering with the much longer-standing human tradition of polygyny).

The change from polygyny to monogamy is a plausible precedent for a change from heterosexual monogamy to marriage between any two individuals. [UPDATE: I think someone who advocated allowing inter-racial marriage at a time when 90% of the country was against it would be an "extremist." Extremists are sometimes right.]