Eighty years ago, a small but vocal minority of social conservatives lead by Carrie Nation banded together in a grand attempt at social engineering. The result was perhaps one of the most frivolous amendments to the Constitution ever — the Eighteenth Amendment, more commonly known as Prohibition, which brought with it 13 years of lawlessness and violence before it was eventually repealed.

Flash forward to today. Once again, a vocal minority of social conservatives wants to amend the Constitution for the purposes of social engineering, this time as a final trump card on the same-sex marriage debate. While the end of lawlessness and violence is highly unlikely as a result, the basic fallacy of amending the Constitution for tactical advantages in present social policy is the same.

The idea of amending the Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriages is not a new idea — in fact, it has long been a pet project of social conservative groups. What’s new is the president is set to endorse such an amendment, known primarily as the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) — and the fact it already has more than 100 co-sponsors within the House of Representatives.

Specifically, the text of the amendment would read, “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.”

It sounds innocuous enough until one considers the legal ramifications. Two of the legal scholars who helped draft the amendment’s text, professors Robert P. George of Princeton and Gerard V. Bradley of Notre Dame Law School told the Washington Post just of what their legal intent was — not only would such an amendment forbid states from making marriage available to same-sex couples in the traditional sense, it would also forbid them from recognizing certain types of civil unions that provide similar benefits to traditional marriage.

Compounding this, argues libertarian legal scholar Eugene Volokh, is that such an amendment may not forbid such unions but make them legally unenforceable. The scenario goes as follows: A gay individual living in a state which recognizes same sex unions as entitled to the same legal entitlements as married individuals petitions his Human Resources director to add his recognized partner to his insurance policy. The HR director balks, arguing that the text of the federal marriage amendment (FMA) forbids the state from requiring him to confer the same benefits upon “unmarried individuals” as married ones.

Further adding insult to injury, Volokh advances the case to the next level, where an administrative judge rules in favor of the HR director, arguing that while the state statute entitles the gay couple to the same benefits as due to married couples, the FMA simply trumps any state law to that end, forbidding the state from actually enforcing its own statute.

Thus we have a crisis of federalism brought about by the scorched earth tactics of same conservatives who claim to pay fealty to it. Not only does the FMA forever raze the ground where activist judges such as those in Massachusetts forced the state legislature to recognize same-sex unions — it may very well bind the hands of state legislatures to a federal mandate.

None of this even touches upon the sheer frivolity of amending the Constitution for social policy ends. The very nature of the Constitution is one which constrains the government to a limited set of functions, explicitly forbidding the government from compromising particular rights, establishing a presumption of individual liberty before the law and remanding all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government to the states and people respectively. To countermand this long and illustrious tradition for the ends of achieving a tactical advantage in the present is not only utterly frivolous, but an insult to the very nature of the Constitution.

Proponents of preserving the traditional definition of marriage should take a second look at history with regard to their tactics. If said defenders of tradition cannot be convinced to divorce the state from marriage entirely, a better solution would be to respect the Jeffersonian tradition of states as “laboratories of democracy,” a solution that at the very least shows deference to American tradition while avoiding the perils that entail social engineering by Constitutional amendment.