If gay unions receive legal recognition, then everyone under that jurisdiction does in fact have to recognize them everytime they pay a tax into that jurisdiction.
To the extent that taxes are used to provide marital benefits, yes. That's a problem, all right, but it's a problem common to all taxes; there's no way to make sure every dollar gets spent only on things that the specific individual who paid in that dollar would have approved.
But anyway, does that mean you support the judicial imposition of gay marriage/civil unions, or in other words, the forced societal recogntion of them by as few as 5 people acting w/o any regard for the original intent of the Constitution.
You mean, have I quit beating my wife yet ;-) ?
I believe that a principled 'judicial activism' in defense of liberty rights, practiced through the exercise of judicial review, is exactly what the relevant original intent of the Constitution was; I think the right of consenting adults to marry as they please is a right deserving of that sort of protection; and I don't think the exercise of judicial review, on this subject or any other,amounts to an 'imposition' of anything on anyone in any Constitutionally relevant sense. The courts don't demand that states recognize marriages at all -- just that if and so long as they do so, they do it within the Constitution.
Whose principles? Your's, the Justices or the the Europeans? Cripes.
"I believe that a principled 'judicial activism'"
Thanks. That's really all I need to know. You believe in judges making law so long as they are making laws that you think are somehow embodied in the Constitution, or really, that you think should be embodied therein.
Marriage is a construct of society, not some fundamental right, and as such society has a right to define it. That a state's decision to recognize traditional marriage means it must, under the Constitution, recognize homosexual marriage is the view of those who hold the ridiculously open-ended view of the Constitution as a 'living, breathing, evolving' document that changes to meet the times, and that the only arbiters of how it must change are the Courts. Scalia has effectively thrashed that whole mindset of chaning values and 'emerging national consensus' by pointing out that the judges are merely substituting their own personal ideological views in place of the people at large.
The idea that any part of the Constitution was ever ratified with the thought that it might ever be used in such a manner can't be taken seriously. It is not right for the Courts to take provisions that dealt with, for example, ex-slaves and black Americans, and then arbitrarily decide that they now apply to homosexuals. Such a decision should ideally be made by an Amendment, or at the very least by those elected officials who are accountable to the people.
The problem with the Left and those sharing your views is that you know such an Amendment can't be ratified, and that the legislatures will not act as you wish, so you therefore cloak this obvious unpopular dirty work of the Left in Constitutional rhetoric.