Once the moral status of homosexual behavior has been surrendered, it’s easy, if you don’t think too hard, to smoosh together the moral objections to that behavior with the old-time visceral loathing that racists felt toward “race-mixing.”…To abandon the argument on the moral merits of homosexual relationships, as I foolishly advocated, is to freely accept the position of disenfranchised crank in today’s America. And given Americans’ very tenuous grasp on the meaning of freedom, such a position isn’t safe.

President Obama, and each of the Clintons, has made a public statement parallel to my own on this volatile topic, so I stand in illustrious company as I say it: I wish to reverse my previous public statements on same-sex marriage. The progress of law, the statements and actions of gay advocates, and the movement of public opinion have rendered my old views repugnant to me, and I now I offer a full and public retraction. Thanks to the hard work of Apple, Walmart, and the national media, I have changed my mind on same sex marriage.

I now oppose it.

Less than two years ago, I wrote that conservatives and Christians probably ought to chalk up the legal battle for natural marriage as lost, and offer a “grand compromise.” Instead of relying on valid, truthful, but unpopular arguments from nature, tradition and the well-being of children to stop the progress of same-sex marriage, I thought that we should switch to arguments from freedom of association. We should agree to allow same-sex couples in each of the 50 states the benefits of the tenuous, temporary sex contract that “marriage” had become in the wake of no-fault divorce — but only if we received two important concessions in return:

1. Laws permitting “covenant marriages”in each of those states, granting couples who wished it access to the protections that covered marriage and the family circa 1940 — when divorce was hard to obtain in most American states, and only for provable cause such as physical abuse, abandonment or adultery. The same arguments from individual liberty that would permit same-sex couples to obtain flimsy, secular marriages must allow couples to contract more durable bonds, if they chose to. The state that would enforce the gay contract (a) should be willing to likewise enforce “covenant” contract (b).
2. Repeal of laws prohibiting discriminationon the basis of sexual orientation — which otherwise would impose a crushing burden on religious believers in particular, violating their freedom of association.

I thought that such a compromise might end the legal battle, and even strengthen marriage, provided that:

3. Christian churches rallied to defend marriagewithin their own denominations. As a Catholic, I thought that my church could light the way bytightening up its own treatment of marriage — demanding extensive religious instruction for couples who wanted to marry in church; insisting that wherever “covenant marriages” were available they must contract them; and making annulments (Catholic declarations that a marriage had never existed) much, much harder to get.

Well, wasn’t I a prophet?

As things turned out, the Supreme Court instead of the voters will dictate same-sex marriage, as it dictates everything else of importance in our democracy. The only question remaining is how many Republican appointees will vote like Democrats. So Christians and conservatives have no horse to trade.

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