and so it begins

On Monday alone, more than a thousand homosexual couples applied for marriage licenses in Massachusetts. The state's Supreme Judicial Court has successfully made an end run around the democratic process: Massachusetts voters will not be able to make their collective voice heard for another eighteen months.

Judicial despotism, indeed.

In part because of ideology, and in part because of ease of presentation, the press tends to portray the pro and con sides as civil libertarians and religious fundamentalists, respectively. And as is the case with most such dichotomies, this is a gross oversimplification. It is true that much opposition to gay marriage is grounded in religious conviction. Nonetheless: there are other arguments on the conservative side that proponents of homosexual unions cannot dismiss as mere benighted bigotry (although even those who ought know better still often do).

Anthropologist Stanley Kurtz, for instance, aruges that legalized gay marriage is one factor in the overall decline of marriage in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. The most obvious response is to charge that Kurtz is confusing correlation and causation, and indeed this is the tack that many of his critics have adopted. His latest rebuttal may be found here.

Elsewhere Kurtz contends that gay marriage is but the first step to legalized polyamory. A slippery slope argument? To be sure: but as the social evolution of recent decades has demonstrated, that does not render it necessarily fallacious.

Lesbians who bear children with sperm donors sometimes set up de facto three-parent families. Typically, these families include a sexually bound lesbian couple, and a male biological father who is close to the couple but not sexually involved. Once lesbian couples can marry, there will be a powerful legal case for extending parental recognition to triumvirates. It will be difficult to question the parental credentials of a sperm donor, or of a married, lesbian non-birth mother spouse who helps to raise a child from birth. And just as the argument for gay marriage has been built upon the right to gay adoption, legally recognized triple parenting will eventually usher in state-sanctioned triple (and therefore group) marriage.

Expect court challenges based on this scenario before the end of the decade.

Then there is Mark Steyn's argument, one that I have not seen elsewhere. (Be sure to catch it while you can—articles tend not to remain posted at his site for long.)

Language has been an important weapon in the gay movement’s very swift advance. In the old days, there was “sodomy”: an act. In the late 19th century, the word “homosexuality” was coined: a condition. A generation ago, the accepted term became “gay”: an identity. Each formulation raises the stakes: one can object to and even criminalize an act; one is obligated to be sympathetic towards a condition; but once it’s a fully-fledged 24/7 identity, like being Hispanic or Inuit, anything less than whole-hearted acceptance gets you marked down as a bigot. […]

I’m against gay marriage. I’m against it for what I think is a conservative reason. Marriage has been around for thousands of years. Sodomy, as a sexual act, goes back just as far, but homosexuality, as a recognized condition, dates only from the late 19th century, and gayness, as a 24/7 social identity, is of even more recent vintage. Who’s to say it isn’t a passing phase? […]

It’s not that the legal status of homosexuality is in a state of rapid change, it’s that gay identity itself is. That’s essentially the argument the Episcopal Bishops make, twisting themselves into pretzels to square the unhelpful Biblical strictures on homosexuality with their New Hampshire colleague’s vigorous sex life: the Bible can’t really be against homosexuality, says the Bishop of Maryland, as homosexuality, in the sense we know it in 2003, didn’t exist back then. But that logic cuts both ways. Because gay identity is evolving so rapidly, we don’t yet know where it will settle – or even where it will be in 50 years’ time. The present phase may one day seem as quaintly anachronistic as Cole Porter’s lavender marriage. Does it make sense to discard the assumptions of millennia for what, in the scheme of things, may be no more than the fashion of a moment?

I think not.