I just finished reading a piece in City Journal on the hazards of gay marriage. I agree with most of it yet find myself unconvinced by the sole backhanded compliment the author gives to the gay marriage movement, conceding that movement towards gay marriage is irrevocable. Nothing is irrevocable, least of all social policy mistakes such as gay marriage. Under that standard, welfare reform would have been impossible instead of merely being extremely hard to do and highly costly in broken lives and social malignancy.
I don't think that the ratchet effect is nearly all it's cracked up to be. Gay marriage, if it every becomes more than a Massachusetts aberration, will eventually be rolled back after the cost ceases to become hypothetical and the victims of the new dispensation become the majority of the voting public. This is what's going on right now with easy divorce. The Gen X victims are simply and increasingly hostile to those self-absorbed parents deluding themselves that dissolving inconvenient marriages is somehow excusable.
Gays may well reflect on this. If they end up pushing such a useful social institution such as marriage into the trash heap, those who have to retrieve and repair it might just have a diminished sense of tolerance and acceptance to those who caused the problem in the first place.
Posted by TMLutas at July 18, 2004 05:15 PM