So. When my partner and I first got together she was still recovering from the lingering effects of some sort of gastrointestinal amoeba she’d picked up while trekking through Nepal, Thailand, and Burma.

Ezra Klein explains both why arguments in favor of hetero-only marriage no longer hold up… and why that’s a good thing.

...Ross Douthat, as humane and thoughtful a supporter of traditional marriage as you’ll find, is not able to present one.

...

The closest Douthat comes to an answer is to quote Eve Tushnet saying that “marriage exists in large part to structure how you behave before you marry.” The obvious response to this is that marriage does not obviously transform the way the unmarried behave, and the state does not enforced a behavior code as a precondition for marriage. No matter, Tushnet says, “in order for men and women to have sex with one another, to avoid causing a lot of disruption and wrong action in society, they have to do a lot of difficult things. The fact that a lot of them don’t want to do those things now and don’t even see those things as related to marriage is part of the problem, not an excuse to further move away from the idea of marriage as the structure.”

In other words, America does not currently conceive of marriage in the way that Douthat and Tushnet would like it to conceive of marriage, and in the way it would need to conceive of marriage in order for there to be a good reason the institution can’t accommodate gays.

He said it here.

In other words the tradition that Eve Tushnet values would first unnaturally constrain men and women into unnatural social and economic relationship to each other in order to make them seek what Douthat seems to feel is merely a differently unnatural social and economic relationship in marriage.

And the point of that would be?

Here’s the funny part.

The part that just sort of generally invalidates Tushnet and Douthat’s peculiar foundation for marriage.

Same-sex people don’t seem to have needed that peculiar double bind to be perfectly willing, able to have durable, long-term, committed, loving relationships with their partners. They haven’t needed that pressure to stand by each other. They haven’t needed it to raise healthy families. They haven’t needed it to be productive and integrated members of their communities.

And so, by extension, neither have straight people.

This is not an argument against marriage, obviously. It is an argument against the traditional notion of marriage as a tool of social control. And it is an argument against the exclusion of participants based on the sex, gender, identity, orientation, or bodily configuration.