And it definitely does not mean that in the long run gay culture can cultivate and sustain the attitudes, behaviors, and norms that will conform gays to the ideal of marriage rather than reform marriage to the realities of homosexuality. Individual gays cannot remake homosexuality to fit the marital paradigm any more than individual heterosexuals can redefine sexual intercourse as a physical act with no more significance than a handshake. Human nature, including our sexual nature, is not so pliable.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate takes issue with my criticisms of what I call “the rhetoric of sameness” that is typically employed to promote gay marriage. To demonstrate just how misleading this rhetoric is, I contrast it to the African American Civil Rights Movement, which succeeded in extending political rights to blacks without erasing the distinctiveness and specificity of their history and culture. White Americans had to learn how to treat blacks as equal but not exactly the same as themselves. Blacks were not, that is, treated as if they were really white people who only appeared to be black. So why do gay marriage advocates ask us to treat gay love as if it is really straight?

Stern’s main response to my argument is to make a slight yet significant modification to the rhetoric of sameness: “That argument is that gay people’s marriages are essentially the same as the straight sort—based on the same notions of love and commitment, support and affection.” Notice that this restatement of the sameness rhetorical strategy backs down from the idea that gay love is the same as straight love, or that gay culture is the same as straight culture. Stern is punting on those large (and largely indefensible) claims. Instead, he wants to defend the much smaller claim that gay married couples are the same as straight married couples.

Does even that small claim have any merit? Yes, it does. I have no doubt that some gay married couples are every bit as loving, committed, supportive and affectionate as many straight married couples. But the true affection between gay couples does not mean that homosexuality as such has a natural orientation toward marriage in the same way that heterosexuality does. It doesn’t even mean that gay married couples have the same understanding and experience of marriage that straight couples do.

And it definitely does not mean that in the long run gay culture can cultivate and sustain the attitudes, behaviors, and norms that will conform gays to the ideal of marriage rather than reform marriage to the realities of homosexuality. Individual gays cannot remake homosexuality to fit the marital paradigm any more than individual heterosexuals can redefine sexual intercourse as a physical act with no more significance than a handshake. Human nature, including our sexual nature, is not so pliable.

Stern’s only other response to my argument is to chastise me for “talking about that favorite Catholic obsession, sex.” He tries to shame me for bringing up sex, surely a strange move for someone so committed to sexual liberation!

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