Kmiec: "Say 'no' to the Brave New World"

Finally! Prominent Constitutional Law professor Douglas Kmeic has written an op-ed for SFGate that raises the issue of same-sex procreation and how it relates to marriage. It doesn't go all the way to the conclusions I'd like it to, but it points in the right direction.

Separating marriage from procreation may also have other remote, but frightening, ill consequences. Society should be skeptical of wider use of asexual procreation. An earlier dark moment in U.S. history employed eugenics to forcibly sterilize the mentally disabled. The push for artificial wombs and the genetic manipulation of intelligence already peppers scientific literature - a push that would no doubt grow, accommodating even the minimal same-sex desire for simulating natural child birth - claimed to be of interest for 20-30 percent of same-sex couples. When carefully assessed, the acquisition of unnatural reproductive means often advances the interests of the very affluent through a libertarian exercise that would threaten all hope of democratic equality.

In a depopulating world, the claim that there is a universal right to marry regardless of gender becomes a frightening ally of a claimed universal right to access to genetically engineered children. People should reject this claim by returning traditional marriage to its rightful place.

The best part is that Professor Kmeic is a close advisor and supporter of Barack Obama, and used to advise Bush I and Reagan on Constitutional law too. So maybe he'll give Barack the right advice and he'll arrive at the right conclusion, and come up with the Egg and Sperm Civil Union Compromise on his own. He needs to advise Obama to start using conception rights as the distinction between civil unions and marriage, and to start actually opposing same-sex marriage in states that already have it, as opposed to having "no problem" with it, and saying that same-sex couples should have all the rights of marriage. He needs to say that same-sex couples in Civil Unions should have all the rights of marriage except the right to conceive children together using their own genes, which should remain the essential right of marriage, and be reserved for a man and a woman.