ABSTRACT
In a nation so torn by family conflict and disintegration that millions find themselves psychologically—if not physically—homeless, men and women naturally find it increasingly difficult to think straight. Leisure for serious reflection and a stable context for reflection both disappear in the social tumult. Perhaps the lack of reflective thought and the absence of a stable context for such thought help explain the profusion of inapt and shallow responses to the unexpected twenty-first-century phenomenon of gay activism for marriage rights. Certainly, no prominent American commentator anticipated the rapid sequence of events that in early 2004 brought hundreds of homosexual couples—in Massachusetts, California, New York, Oregon, and elsewhere—before religious and public officials who were willing to pronounce them married. 1 Sympathetic observers marveled at the bravery of gay activists and compared their wedding ceremonies to the acts of black civil-rights demonstrators in the Sixties. Unsympathetic observers expressed dismay at how brazen homosexuals had become in violating moral tradition and in defying statutory law. Conservative groups subsequently set in motion a number of initiatives—voter referenda, legislative actions, and constitutional amendments—on both state and federal levels to prohibit further homosexual marriages and to invalidate those that had occurred. But amid all of the many pundits praising or damning homosexuals for breaking the marriage barrier, few reflected on just what kind of institution homosexuals—who had never previously laid hold of marriage—were starting to claim. Indeed, if Americans had scrutinized carefully the way the national culture had already redefined wedlock for heterosexuals, they may well have concluded that it was not homosexuals that had changed so much, but rather marriage itself. 92Far from being some astonishing development reflecting unprecedented new attitudes among homosexuals, homosexual weddings constituted the predictable (not natural, but entirely predictable) culmination of cultural changes that had radically denatured marriage.
