Comments on: Outlawing Gay Marriage

By: Nicholas

Nicholas — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:51:06 +0000

To answer the statistical question here the problem is that you only have 3 direct votes. You are dealing with the same problem RA Fisher was with the lady drinking tea, binary data has very low information and the discreteness of the permutation distribution makes a “significant” result very nigh impossible without a lot of assumptions.

Now with regards to the data I have a hard time seeing a congressional decision in Holland or Spain, parliamentary systems the same as a congressional decision in the US. Parliamentary systems are often more democratic than our REPUBLIC, though one might argue that at the state level representation might be better as it tends to be more local.

I do have to agree with you about direct democracy promoting intolerance.

By: John Cook

John Cook — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:16:17 +0000

The American founders were conservative rebels. That sounds like an oxymoron, but I don’t believe it is. They fought to restore their traditional liberties. They were very different from the French revolutionaries a few years later who had more Utopian goals.

By: John Myles White

John Myles White — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:56:40 +0000

While I agree with your intuition that the founders were more conservative than most Americans are now in many respects, I’m not sure that I think the term conservative is ideal in this case: the founders were rebels after all.

I also don’t think their core motive was to prevent innovation. Federalist Number 10 explicitly describes preventing factions, defined as, “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens” Of course, the relevant issue in this debate is whether you think “not having to know certain other citizens can get married” or “being able to get married” is more of a right. It’s messy business, for sure.

By: John Cook

John Cook — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:48:34 +0000

It’s true that the founders of American democracy were suspicious of direct democracy, but they were fundamentally conservative: they were suspicious of the power of direct democracy to innovate. On this subject the public isn’t innovating, courts are.