THOMPSON: As far as gay rights are concerned, I looked at this New Hampshire decision by the New Hampshire state legislature, and it concerned me when they passed a bill. Number one, this wasn't some renegade judge, this was a state legislature and they made a decision to support civil unions. I look at it, and it seems like it's really a marriage bill that gives you all the rights of marriage.
I believe in federalism. I believe, generally speaking, that the federal government ought to concentrate on the enumerated powers and do the things it's supposed to be doing, as it's not doing, as we were just talking about, in many cases, and leave other things to the states. Places of innovation and competition, welfare reform, came out of that exercise. But on something like this, you've got something called full faith and credit. I think what is going to happen now is that people are going to take these state laws and go to other places that doesn't have these state laws and strongly oppose them and say, “We deserve full faith and credit.” There’s an exception to that, the lawyers will tell you, except it’s contrary to a home state’s public policy, you know, they can get around it. I think federal judges probably are going to start saying, “No, the Fourteenth Amendment requires you that you to give them full faith and credit,” and you're going to have that situation going on around the country.
Therefore, I think that it's an appropriate subject for a constitutional amendment, but one that calls for leaving it up to the states to make these decisions themselves, but not giving full faith and credit. If you don't have it in your state, nobody else can impose it on you. It seems to me like that that’s a fair solution.
It's as close to gay marriage as you could possibly get. You may be interested that John McCain has similarly rationalized the New Hampshire bill under the same "federalist" argument as Thompson:
Sort of a Missouri Compromise. You may be right. It might be a doomed idea.