a reasonable approach if it's clearly laid out what constitutes an extreme change.  No offense intended, but I've met some of your countrymen who seem to think eliminating the entire Muslim population would count as a minor administrative matter.

I assume your judges are somehow selected by elected officials.  It's not like they're hereditary or mystically appear Dalai Lama style.  So it's just one additional layer of indirection.   In any case, I have a hard time seeing US congressmen as representing the "people".  Maybe it's just bitterness at being on the losing side of every single election for the last 30+ years, but based on the ratings they earn in polls I think I'm not alone.

that was quite a typo. Thanks.

I agree with everything you say.  I'd go further and say that civil unions should also be decoupled from the idea of sex.  Any people whose affairs are entangled enough that it's not convenient to determine what belongs to who,  and who trust each other to sign for them,  ought to be eligible.  Parents living with adult children, roommates, business partners. 

But, I don't believe there is a prohibition against arbitrariness.  You might have the start of an argument that the motivation is bigotry - but there have been societies that were tolerant of all kinds of sexual relations but nevertheless didn't have same-sex marriage, so I think you'd have a hard time proving the connection.

to Manish's comment on your diary.    I don't find parliamentary democracy itself to be abhorrent either (although I prefer our system with separately elected executives) but lack of some kind of judicial review seems to be a major flaw.

I don't think gender falls under strict scrutiny.

First week of class,  etc,  plus it's tough to argue against your reasoning when I like the end result.  Nevertheless, I think it's flawed, or rather, equal protection law is flawed.

The basic problem is that the Reconstruction amendments were very poorly written.  Among other things, they protect "privileges and immunities" without giving the slightest hint what those are,  so that the BoR was "incorporated" piecemeal over a period of 150 years, and it's still not finished.   It's just the opening judges needed to give us some spiffy new rights,  but keep in mind that what they give they can take away.

The equal protection clause is especially problematic because the text can't be taken literally, so the textualist approach to interpretation has a problem right at the beginning.   All laws have the property of "dividing people into classes".  For example, people who rob banks or cheat on their taxes are separated out and treated differently than people who don't.  OK, that's silly, but how is it silly according to the text?  To take a less silly example, how about laws that distinguish citizens from non-citizens (recall that the text protects "any person within its jurisdiction"),  or laws that distinguish children from adults, or those over 65 from those under 65, or people born before a certain day from those born after, or people below the poverty line from those above.

An originalist approach leads you to the conclusion that it's about race and race only.  The authors of the equal protection clause didn't even think women should vote,  and it took a whole new amendment to give them the vote, indicating that even deep into the 1900's no one thought the equal protection clause covered gender.   

Since taking the text seriously leads to absurdities, and originalism doesn't get you where you want to be, the court came up with this levels of scrutiny nonsense.  A robustly written amendment might have been less elegant and more lawyerly, but at least it could be obeyed.  Instead, we've got this entirely subjective laundry list of different levels of excuse the government can use to not obey the literal meaning. 

They also had to come up with the concept of a "protected class".  They've interpreted the 14th Amendment such that it violates itself, since it protects some classes of people with higher levels of scrutiny than others. However, I will have to concede that the concept is in line with an originalist view, since the authors were clearly intending to protect African-Americans and no one else.

You made an analogy between race and gender. I see your later comment that it's a different level of scrutiny.  No kidding. "Separate but equal" is forbidden with respect to race,  but Title IX explicitly endorses "separate but equal" when it comes to gender.   We've got separated genders on sports teams,  and even whole schools,  none of which would fly with respect to race.  

The problem with strict/intermediate/rational basis scrutiny, and protected classes determined by courts, is that it pretty much requires legislating from the bench,  something both left and right claim to be against.  When you throw in disparate impact analysis,  literally any law could be subject to an equal protection challenge, and the only thing holding it back is judges deciding what's an important goal and what's not.