No-fault divorce has done more to detroy traditional marriage than gay marriage will do. Moreover, in practice, most heterosexuals do not embrace traditional marriage. That’s probably why when Catholc couples seek annullments usually have their annullments granted. I mean the numbers are grossly large. Marriage is meant to last till death do us part. If Catholics are divorcing at the rate of secular people and 90% of their divorces are getting annulled, that means that in about half of the Catholic weddings taking place, no one is actually giving matrimonial consent to marry.
Or you can be cynical speculate that the American marriage tribunals are corrupt, and that valid marriages are getting annulled. Marriage tribunals are not covered by the doctrine of infallibility after all.
Anyway, the reason why homosexual marriage is getting accepted nearly universally is because heterosexuals have been seeing the bearing of children as optional for a long time now. Moreover most couples live together prior to marriage and see the wedding as a celebration of the success of their relationship, not the marking of a new commitment. Marriage to them is ultimately about gaining civil benefits and making the status of your relationship public. If you read books about how to write your own marriage vows, a lot of the examples given do not even speak of permenence. A good book on the subject is “Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar” It really shows how American courtship has been pretty much destroyed and how marriage is following behind it.
I’m sorry but gay marriage in my opinion is a petty detail, a mere side effect of a much larger problem. The problem is that in putting gay marriage into civil law, you are redefining marriage not on a cultural level, but on a government level. Its like this. A long time ago someone added rat poison to home made spegetti sause. Now for some reason this enhenced the flavor and people kept denying that this secret ingredient was causing illness and was killing some people. When people didn’t have rat poison, they used other types of poison. However for some odd reason people were certain that there was something wrong with using dog poison. Now maybe its because “Who would even want to poison a dog anyway? There is something disordered with that action.” But everyone else is like “Rat poison, ant killer, raid, dog poison. What’s the difference.” So people start rallying around the people who want to use dog poison. Now a group of people are insisting that the recipe books include the option of dog poison to show people “Look stop attacking the people who like the taste of dog poison.” Then the conservatives are getting all upset that dog poison even exists and telling the recipe books “Please, please just add to your book the secret incredient is a poison that does not include the name of a cute furry animal.”
Everyone is missing the big picture. But its like chesterton said. "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
