Supreme Court Same Sex Marriage Argumet

[Anima]

I don't understand what people's ages has to do with gay marriage.

Is this just more slippery slope scaremongering?

Gay marriage does not. However, arguing that marriage is a fundamental right (as the petitioners for gay marriage argued) which is protected by the constitution and not under the jurisdiction of the states or the people does bring up the age issue as that is a restriction upon marriage which if done under State authority only needs to satisfy rational basis scrutiny, but as a fundamental right would need to satisfy strict scrutiny.

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Sort of.  The technical issue here that Anima is getting at is "a ruling that marriage is a fundamental right would make it much harder to place restrictions on marriage."  The suggestion is that any "expansion" of a right to marriage that is sufficiently large to necessitate the removal of a same-sex restriction would be too blunt to avoid also taking out age restrictions.

Even if the animus is "slippery slope scaremongering" - I'm not saying it is in Anima's case, but you do see it a lot on, say, the news or comments sections of websites and such - it's not a ridiculous sort of question to ask.  In this case, however, I think it's extremely obvious that you can expand marriage to be between two men and not have to expand it to be between a 40-year-old man and a 10-year-old girl.  This is partly for reasons I've mentioned above; again, I stress that if you expand what marriage is, you're not expanding the capacity to consent to things such as marriage.

Agreed if the expansion were done simply by means of the State authority. The states could expand the definition (as some have) to include same sex marriage while still maintaining age restrictions under rational basis. The crux here is when the petitioners endeavor to compel the state by means of a Constitutional fundamental right.

Now the capacity to consent is subject of much debate. In law a child over the age of 5 can consent to conduct, but their consent is commonly held to be in accordance with a reasonable child standard rather than a reasonable man standard. However, the law does hold that if a child consents to engage in inherently dangerous or serious conduct they elect to be held in accordance with the reasonable man standard rather than child standard.