If Christian advocates of gay marriage were serious about wanting to extend the good of marriage to gays, then wouldn’t they be seriously working away to establish the moral underpinnings of marriage among gays?
I mean, lack of legal recognition is an obstacle to marriage, but lack of monogamy seems like a bigger problem. You
do hear pro-gay marriage Christians talk about "stable, committed relationships" among gays, it's usually just a premise used in the service of equating gay unions with marriage.
Of course, the conservative argument for gay marriage is that the inability to marry is a major reason for the lack
of monogamy among gays, and that gay marriage will have a civilizing effect on gay sexual mores. I hope it is so.
However, I don't see, nor do I anticipate, a gay "true love waits" campaign or any other serious efforts to convince gays that marriage (now that they've got it) is the only legitimate context for sex. And, with marriage in full retreat among straights, it seems unlikely that we're going to see it really catch on among gays.
Consequently, it's hard not to conclude that gay marriage is not so much about extending the goods of marriage to those formerly marginalized by its structures as it is about further marginalizing and relativizing those structures. So, the point isn't so much that gays can now aspire to the ideal marriage, but that marriage isn't necessarily better or worse than any other arrangement of your sex life.
