Gay-marriage backers constantly mock an idea they cannot grasp, that redefining marriage will damage it. What – they say – suddenly you’ll love your wife less? Obviously not, but as established a few paragraphs back, marriage isn’t a private affair. Its strength as a social institution – as the relationship at the core of the family – has certainly been damaged, too, by the explosion in divorce, but that’s no reason, either, to euthanize the whole thing.

The reason gay “marriage” damages marriage is not because it changes individual couple’s relationships but because it commands us all to accord as much respect to homosexual relations as society always has done to genuine marriage. Insofar as many people, by their own varied moral reasoning, freely choose to see homosexual relationships as somehow disordered, they will respond to this mandate, then, by according less respect to traditional marriage.