I'm delighted to welcome Dale Carpenter, who teaches law at the University of Minnesota, as this week's guest-blogger on same-sex marriage. Dale is a University of Chicago School of Law graduate, and a founder of the law school's conservative debating group, the Edmund Burke Society. He clerked for Judge Edith Jones on the Fifth Circuit, practiced for several years, and in 2000 started at Minnesota, where he teaches and writes on Constitutional Law, the First Amendment, and Sexual Orientation and the Law. He also writes a regular column called OutRight for several gay newspapers around the country; many of these columns can be accessed here.