https://redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/01/19/the-winning-statistic-in-the-same-sex-marriage-debate/feed/Conservative News & Politicsen-usFri, 12 Jun 2026 17:16:36 -0400<![CDATA[There are a welter of issues raised by the public policy debate over same-sex marriage and whether to treat it, for purposes of the law, as identical to traditional opposite-sex marriage. Among other things, there is the broader debate over the propriety of valuing tradition (i.e., the collected experience by trial and error of large numbers of people over time) and the respect we give to broad-based popular sovereignty in evaluating human relationships. But even treated purely as a matter of quantifiable empirical social science, the legal debate comes down to whether there exists any rational basis for distinguishing the two relationships. The burden of establishing the complete absence of such a rational basis is on the proponents of court-mandated &#8220;marriage equality.&#8221; And new Census data makes that burden harder to carry.]]>Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:19:00 -0500<![CDATA[Dan McLaughlin]]>https://redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/01/19/the-winning-statistic-in-the-same-sex-marriage-debate-n37652