HOW HE SEES IT Consider Mass. law a social experiment

By JAMES P. PINKERTON
SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY
Is gay marriage an "abomination"? Is it true that "traditional marriage has been dealt a severe blow"?
So claims Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition, as Massachusetts has begun issuing marriage licenses to homosexual couples. Meanwhile, other states offer precedents for comparison.
If Combs is correct in her dire prognosis, we should know soon enough. And yet a sturdy mechanism brakes any such impact -- namely, the Constitution, specifically, the Tenth Amendment, which reads, "The powers not delegated to the United States ... are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People." In other words, if the Constitution doesn't say that a given issue is a federal responsibility, then the states, or the people themselves, have their own free latitude to accept or reject any newfangled idea.
The Bay State, in its wisdom -- or foolishness, depending on one's point of view -- has legalized gay marriage. Thousands of couples have already rushed to get hitched, and so a new social experiment has been launched.
Prediction
Beyond the Christian Coalition, others of similar leanings predict disaster, too. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, asserts that "the so-called 'gay agenda' is far-reaching, and it encompasses much more than the fight for marriage rights." The risk, he continues, is that America will "lose the institution of marriage."
Continuing in a mode both apoplectic and apocalyptic, Perkins adds, "Churches will be muted, schools will be forced to promote homosexuality as a consequence-free alternative lifestyle, and our nation will find itself embroiled in a cultural, legal and moral quagmire." Yikes. If any of those prophesies come about, Combs and Perkins will have major "I told you so" rights.
But, in the meantime, Americans across the rest of the country are insulated from any such disaster. Some 39 states have enacted "defense of marriage acts," all of which guarantee that their state will not have to recognize a gay marriage from another state, such as Massachusetts. And this, too, was part of the plan of the founders; they intended the states to be separate, like compartments in a ship, so that if one, say, sprung a leak, the ship of the nation-state would be protected.
It's also possible, of course, that the Massachusetts experiment will be deemed successful. "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system," wrote Justice Louis Brandeis in 1932, "that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."
Good example
It is this notion of the states as decentralized "laboratories of democracy" that has enabled much progress in recent decades. A good example is welfare reform. When Wisconsin elected Tommy Thompson as its governor in 1986, the nation's welfare roles had quadrupled in the previous three decades. The conventional wisdom held that there was no escape from chronic and costly welfare dependence, generation after generation.
But Thompson was a problem-solver. He launched the "Wisconsin Works" program, which reduced the state's welfare rolls by 90 percent, even as those exiting the system mostly found jobs and upward mobility.
Thompson's success in his Wisconsin "laboratory" proved to be an inspiration to other states, which imitated his success. In 1996, the federal government signed on, too. In the last decade, the welfare rolls have shrunk from 14 million to barely more than 5 million.
Thanks to the genius of the Constitution, America as a whole can study the Massachusetts experiment, just as it studied the Wisconsin experiment. If, as the Christian Right predicts, gay marriage takes the wheels off Western Civilization, well, the damage will be confined to just one state.
But if, on the other hand, gay marriage is regarded as merely another step in the upward evolution of human rights, the experiment is likely to spread slowly across the country, state by state, in the deliberate and prudential manner that the Founders intended.
XPinkerton is a Newsday columnist.