Gay Marriage Cop-Out

I share many of the impulses that animate Joseph Bottum’s essay: a recognition that gay-marriage opponents have been thoroughly routed in a remarkably brief span; a frustration with how the debate has played out for the church; a desire to rescue the riches of Catholicism from the clichés and caricatures of culture war. I also share his skepticism about some of the natural-law arguments deployed in defense of traditional marriage, his view that the march toward same-sex wedlock follows logically from premises embraced by the culture long ago, and his emphasis on the metaphysical underpinnings of our present situation.

But for all that, I think his central conclusion is either confused or a cop-out. The logic of Bottum’s argument is similar (as he acknowledges) to the logic of Paul Griffiths’s essay in Commonweal’s pages a decade ago (“Legalize Same-Sex Marriage,” June 28, 2004), which argued that Catholics should support civil marriage for gay couples as a means of disentangling the church’s sacramental view of wedlock from a “profoundly pagan” cultural context, and in the hope of “making the church more seductively beautiful” by contrast with the civil law.