Celebrating Lifelong Heterosexual Monogamy as Unique and Indispensable

I've dealt with these arguments over and over again, but I must say Ross Douthat's piece yesterday was an extremely clever analytical outing. He makes the case that marriage not only is entirely unnatural, but has virtually collapsed as a social institution as well. The clincher is the last couple of paragraphs where he describes marriage is a civilizational ideal that's "unique" and "indispensible," and concludes:

That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.

I've read around the horn quite a bit, and Douthat was certainly successful in firing up the masses. With the exception of the Steve Chapman piece (excerpted with additional commentary at Protein Wisdom), it's mostly howling gay bloggers who're up in arms about it. Glenn Greenwald's piece appears to have little familiarity with actually law (or at least moral foundations of the law), but Andrew Sullivan in fact wrote a pretty good essay. Click on Memeorandum to sample some of the responses.

And I suppose it's a good thing that Sully and Rick Ellensburg et al. are pushing for marriage, considering how the gay hookup culture --- despite its murderous health and safety risks --- is still pretty much the rage, at Gawker: