"Were Christians Right About Gay Marriage All Along?"

The Daily Beast

When gay marriage passed in New York three years ago, remember the sympathetic articles there about what gay culture might teach straight marrieds about seeing monogamy in... a certain perspective? I wrote about two of them here and especially here.

Now comes something similar, again taking the position that this may not be a slippery slope down but a stairway up. Excerpts:

Were Christians Right About Gay Marriage All Along?

Mike Blake/Reuters

The marriage equality fight is all but won. Will the future of marriage be boring as hell, or a Bible-thumper’s idea of Sodom and Gomorrah?

By Jay Michaelson

Same-sex marriage is becoming a national inevitability....

Which leads to a perfectly logical question: What’s next?

Moderates and liberals have argued that same-sex marriage is No Big Deal — it’s the Same Love, after all, and gays just want the same lives as everyone else. But further right and further left, things get a lot more interesting. What if gay marriage really will change the institution of marriage, shifting conceptions around monogamy and intimacy? On the other hand, what if the domesticating institution of marriage changes — and even erases — the more libertine tendencies of gay culture?

...If you think about it, actual monogamy has never been the Western norm.

...What would happen if gay non-monogamy — and I’ll include writer Dan Savage’s “monogamish” model, which involves extramarital sex once a year or so — actually starts to spread to straight people?... Is non-monogamy one of the things same-sex marriage can teach straight ones, along with egalitarian chores and matching towel sets?

...The future of marriage, in fact, may turn out to be a lot like the Christian Right’s nightmare: a sex-positive, body-affirming compact between two adults that allows for a wide range of intimate and emotional experience....

...I want to admit a certain discomfort with [the] more radical vision. We are still a messed-up, male-dominated society that has trouble dealing with sexuality. Sure, polyamory works well for a few hyper-educated urban elites. But what about douchebags? What will sexual liberation look like at the bottom-feeding, lowest common denominator?

...But radical traditionalists aren’t the only ones fearing the consequences of same-sex marriage. So, it may surprise you to learn, are radical progressives....

...Normalizing marriage is a narrowing, rather than an expanding, of sexual possibility. Radicals point out that gay liberation in the 1970s was, as the name implies, a liberation movement. It was about being free, questioning authority, rebellion. “2-4-6-8, smash the church and smash the state,” people shouted.

Can you imagine that being chanted from the General Electric float at the pride parade? Today’s LGBT movement is, at most, about equality — that is, about assimilation. Its defining symbol is the equals sign. Liberation promised greater-than.

...If I had to predict, I’d go with a gradual realization of the conservative nightmare — only it won’t be a nightmare, and plenty of straight people will thank us for it....

Read the whole article; it loses a lot with just these excerpts (May 27, 2014).

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