Conservatives have to level the playing field first. That means defunding the left and using political and government power, or whatever works, to disarticulate and destroy the liberal monopoly over processes of information delivery and loci of opinion formation.
I'm open to ideas on how to accomplish this.
If gay marriage is to be stopped or contained, conservatives must either come up with arguments that don't involve religion, tradition, or so-called "natural law",....
Natural law is the basis of the Enlightnment and the American experiment. Who said we have to give that up in order to be allowed to participate in the national conversation?
.... or they must do the much harder work of getting the mushy middle to go along with establishing their religious beliefs, maintaining tradition for its own sake, and defining what they mean by "natural law" in a way that makes sense.
Let's start with reinstituting the Western Canon in schools, and teaching kids about the mission of Western Civilization and its special subset, the American experiment. Let's teach them about American exceptionalism, and why the service-oriented, officious machine politics of the Left is a corruption of all of the above. Let's start there. And to do that, we have to get rid of the Ivy League, the academic Left, and the National Education Association. We must not only take education away from them, we must drive them out of education completely, preferably to roam the world in perpetual exile from the country they betrayed. If exile was good enough for the Man Without a Country, then it should be good enough for the mobs of World Socialism enthusiasts who have battened on our education establishment and laid their parasitic eggs in the ears of society's children.
I'm open to ideas on how to accomplish this.
You're engaging in the best idea as to how to do that. The Internet will level the playing field like no other force in the history of communication, since the printing press. The nanny news media would keep us from seeing the Nick Berg beheading in all its gore, but with the Internet, we aren't going to be subject to Dan Rather's version of, "You can't handle the truth!"
Natural law is the basis of the Enlightnment and the American experiment.
The application of natural law to the American experiment had no problem with slavery, or the limitation of voting to white, property owning males. The American experiment is not a dead institution, and the extension of rights to those formerly on the "outs" with societal norms is continuing. At least that's the message that proponents of gay marriage have been successfully selling.
As for the rest of your post, I'm in full agreement. A classical education in Western Civilization is essential to an understanding of what our forebears lived, fought and died for.
While you might well imagine our nation's Framers coming back today, and having a cow over gay marriage, before they got to that point, they'd have an elephant over many other things. I was listening to an Australian today, who said that black people were more integrated in American society than Aborigines were integrated into Aussie society. One of the listeners at our table disagreed, but then he pointed out that it would be unthinkable for an Aborigine to be his country's Secretary of State. I reflected later than forty years ago, it would have been similarly unthinkable that we would have had Colin Powell as either Secretary of State, or as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Things change. This is just one of them.