How to tell if an issue merits a lot more discussion: When liberals start saying "the debate is over":
Someday soon the fracas surrounding all this will seem like a historical artifact, like the notion that women were once prohibited from voting and a black individual from marrying a white one. Our children will attend the marriages of their friends, will chatter about whether they will last, will whisper to one another, "Love him, don't like him so much." The California Supreme Court called gay marriage a "basic civil right." In hindsight, it will merely be called ordinary life.
That's Anna Quindlen, writing in Newsweek. But in the same essay, she writes that immediately after the California decision, "opponents were suggesting that civilization would crash and burn if two guys could register at Pottery Barn and raise kids in a ranch house." So, the debate isn't really over. What she means is that the debate should be over, if only everyone were as enlightened and as morally superior as she is.
The grandaddy of all "the debate is over" isssues is, of course, global warming, and Anna's right in there on that one, too -- one of the most complex, difficult-to-predict phenomena there is, and the debate is over. A definition of marriage that has been operational since the dawn of history, and the debate is over.
