One way or another, it’s coming. The question, now, is what difference it will make. Opponents fear that recognizing gay marriage will undermine the vanilla kind and weaken the importance of the family as the basic building block of human society. Perhaps it will, but the great experiment has begun, and we will just have to wait and see. The family has been in decline for some time in the United States. The precipitous decline of traditional family arrangements in lower income levels tends to perpetuate and intensify social inequality and for that reason among others, we at Via Meadia view it with concern.

It is, however, hard to draw a causal connection between the growing public acceptance of homosexuality and the decline of lifetime heterosexual monogamy as a social and personal ideal. The timelines don’t match, for one thing: greater acceptance of divorce, remarriage, heterosexual cohabitation and unmarried parenthood preceded public acceptance of gay marriage. Overall it seems to us that the weakening of the family and the acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage both reflect the growing individualism of our culture. Americans are becoming more libertarian and are less patient with social pressure to conform and with legal restraints on their freedom of action. That is pretty much what has been happening since the colonial era, and we don’t see it ending anytime soon. That trend in some ways is positive and liberating; in others it creates some serious problems. Either way we can’t see gay marriage as some kind of independent variable driving the country over the cliff or into utopia.