SUBOPTIMAL

SUBOPTIMAL

Rhetorical questions are not helpful tools in advancing any discussions but at the eve of the Supreme Court taking up the question of same sex marriage, I have to ask this one:

Why does the Beltway always settle for suboptimal solutions?

The answer -of course – is that decision making in Washington is so much influenced by money, ideology and pressure groups that straight thinking (no pun intended) is hard to come by.

In the case of same sex marriage, I simply cannot imagine why we have not embarked on a course of creating parallel and equally entitled institutions at the Federal level. That is the approach that States have taken by creating the institution of civil unions (although others have gone the marriage route and some have done both).

The institution of a civil union was first created in Denmark in 1989 and is now practiced in many countries and in ten States in the USA.

Would the valid question of discrimination and constitutionality even have come up if same sex couples in every jurisdiction of the United States had been offered the path of a civil union that guarantees – from a public perspective – full legal equality with marriage? This path would have avoided a lot of unnecessary angst and debate and it would have respected the age old sanctity of union of a man and a woman in marriage.

Opinion polls on this subject are notoriously unreliable. Mostly because they ask the wrong question. There is very little doubt that there is a solid majority in the US for affording same sex couples equal rights before the law with conventional couples. And if this equality can only be obtained through marriage, then ultimately, the equal rights argument will prevail.

No one that I know of has tested the public opinion on offering same sex couples the equal rights through the parallel path of a federally recognized civil union; it has not come up, because that solution is not on the table.

Our tendency to settle for suboptimal solutions in the Beltway is not limited to the matter of equal rights for same sex couples.

The legislative handling of the gun violence in America is going exactly the same way.

The reason for not reaching for the stars but settling for suboptimal solutions is not only found in the money influence and the pressure groups. It is the direct result of our political polarization and the fact that if legislative compromises are found at all, they are based on the lowest common denominator, the politically feasible rather than the strategically desirable. A legislative compromise is only good when it combines the best elements of what one party wants with the best elements of what the other party wants.

Finally, legislation in America is more often than not done reactively, rather than proactively. We don’t jump into action until we have stared disaster in the face. That was true after 9/11, it was true after the bank crisis in 2008 and now after the massacre at Newtown. And in our hurry to be seen doing something we address symptoms of the problem rather than the causes for the problem.

Congress has a lot of work to do. It owes the constituency a rational and effective approach to the reduction of gun violence (although –as David Brooks points out in his NYT column “The killing chain” of March 26 – we may be looking in the wrong places for effective solutions). It will once and for all have to come up with an intelligent approach to immigration. And it will have to find a way to put its fiscal house in order.

With all these vitally important issues to be addressed “suboptimal” does not cut it, but it may be all we will be getting.