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New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Gay Marriage and Federalism
The current
debate over gay marriage, writes Steve Chapman, makes the framers
of the Constitution begin to look even wiser than usual. Somehow
they anticipated that people in Massachusetts would not want to
live under exactly the same laws as people in Mississippi. So they
set up a system known as federalism, which allows different states
to choose different policies. Thus we simultaneously uphold
majority rule and minority rights. This, Chapman notes, is how
federalism is supposed to operate—letting subsets of the national
population get their way in their own locales. There's only one
hitch: The federal government keeps getting in the way.
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