Peter Schiff just lost the Republican nod for US Senator in Connecticut. If someone ever embodied the antithesis to the nation’s current approach, it is Schiff.

We’ve written before in favor of gay marriage, so I guess I’m happy to see Prop 8 overturned by a federal judge. Unfortunately, we’ve also written in favor of federalism and I see nothing in the Constitution pertaining to marriage. Regardless, I find the progressive “victory” yesterday somewhat ironic. The reason I find it ironic is because although gay marriage is a cause celeb for progressives, assuming the federal ruling holds up, the progressive “victory” was won in a completely anti-democratic way.

Marriage may be a covenant, but legally speaking, it is nothing more than a contract. Thus, since an entity or contract can contain more meaning to the people involved than the actual contractual arrangement written up and filed at the local courthouse, anything that gets the job done can do. Perhaps the very institution of marriage should be opened up to a little bit of healthy market competition from other contractual arrangements.

As seen in Part 1, political terms, such as liberal, conservative or libertarian, are muddled enough. Unfortunately, political organizations, popular terms and ideologies have many of the same issues. The political parties in the United States have gone through whole sale shifts in political ideology. Republicans used to be the party of tariffs and protectionism, now they are avid free traders. Democrats were the party of slavery and Jim Crow, before becoming the party of Civil Rights and Affirmative Action.