the "conservative" case for gay marriage

Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institute and a writer for the National Journal makes a good case for encouraging the movement toward gay marriage. For once, it doesn’t say “Gay marriage is good, because people who are against it are uptight Bush-loving Methhead NASCAR freaks who are probably closeted anyway.” Just a note: that case doesn’t win much support.

The final paragraph is an excellent one:

There are two ways to see the legal marriage of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon [the first gay couple to be married in California]. One is as the start of something radical: an experiment that jeopardizes millennia of accumulated social patrimony. The other is as the end of something radical: an experiment in which gay people were told that they could have all the sex and love they could find, but they could not even think about marriage. If I take the second view, it is on conservative – in fact, traditional – grounds that gay souls and straight society are healthiest when sex, love and marriage all walk in step.

Now if we could just rid ourselves of that annoying “Adam and Steve” cliché.

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