Fate Of Marriage: Careful What You Wish For

Ross Douthat has an insightful and thought-provoking column in the New York Times on the possible implications of the shifiting definition of marriage. He examines the situation carefully and dispassionately. It's worth everyone's attention.
Here's an excerpt:

Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature.

Critics of gay marriage see this as one of the great dangers in severing the link between marriage and the two realities — gender difference and procreation — that it originally evolved to address. A successful marital culture depends not only on a general ideal of love and commitment, but on specific promises, exclusions and taboos. And the less specific and more inclusive an institution becomes, the more likely people are to approach it casually, if they enter it at all.

In courts and now legislatures, this has been a losing argument. But as gay New Yorkers ponder what they want their marriages to mean, they should consider one of its implications: The hardest promises to keep are often the ones that keep people together.

The columnist refers to courts and legislatures and suggests that in these bodies the stand against gay marriage has been  "a losing argument." But, it's worth noting that in the 31 states where voters have been given the choice to redefine marriage, the traditional definition of marriage has won every time.

Click here to read the entire column.