Gay marriage, blacklists, and compromise

If you haven’t chanced upon the all-out slugfest in the comments section following Sonny’s post about the Prop 8-supporting employee of the California Musical Theater, you might want to take a peek now. It’s an amusing but bewildering miasma of peace, love, understanding, and bad jokes (and that’s just in my comments!).

Something I’ve noticed from those comments, and from people on the anti-Prop 8 side in general, is the disbelief that there’s any willingness on the other side to accept a compromise. On the contrary, I think that there is, or that there could be such willingness if it’s not there already. Rod Dreher thinks so too:

Eugene Volokh, the UCLA law prof who supports gay marriage, once wrote that one of the key goals of the gay rights movement is to punish and marginalize people who in private life hold views they see as anti-gay. I’m working on a column for Sunday in which I discuss why it’s in the interest of prudent social conservatives and prudent gay rights activists to come to some sort of settlement that would allow for gay marriage while establishing a zone of protection of religious liberty around religious institutions, for the sake of religious freedom. But I fear that the gay rights movement isn’t interested in that — that it’s only interested in crushing its enemies. . . .

I hope his fears are unfounded. I’m looking forward to what he has to say on Sunday, and I hope we can all pause and listen to the pragmatic voices out there who are asking to be heard over the din.