A couple people have asked me about my response to prop 8 passing in CA. I am making an effort not to delve into particular partisan issues and instead focus on higher, meta-issues. Thus I will point out what I find most interesting in this.
There was $75 million dollars spent on pro-8 advertising. This, of course, excludes the amount of time contributed to the campaign by volunteers. These are people who are not directly affected by gay marriage themselves, and thus this can be thought of as a sort of charitable behavior (whether you agree with them or not, they are not doing this for personal gain).
Consider the implication of this; people chose to spend $75 million dollars of their charitable funds on this issue. According to Children International, the cost of providing food, clothing, basic health care and education to a child in Africa is $264/year. That money would have provided for 284,091 children for a year. That is just for Prop 8 in California - two other states had such campaigns as well. Regardless of my feelings on gay marriage, I cannot believe that ending gay marriage is worth the suffering of that many children. Charitable dollars are fungible, and the structuralist approach to viewing causes should always look at such alternative use of those dollars.