As I’ve said in this space many times, the gay marriage campaign succeeded so thoroughly and so rapidly in large part because it built on what heterosexuals had already come to believe was true about sex and marriage. Gay marriage was inevitable, because straights had already queered sex and marriage via the Sexual Revolution. Yet gay marriage was a Rubicon for our society because it took those radical shifts past the breaking point, and locked them in to law and culture. All that followed was predictable, and it was in fact predicted, not because anybody had a crystal ball, but because it made logical sense.
Once again, read this line from Nathaniel Frank:
Inherent in queer desire is the belief that sexual pleasure is a good in itself and [sex and marriage are] expressions of individual liberty and dignity.
Desire untethered from anything but individual will is a universal solvent of social bonds.
It has never been more important to affirm — and to affirm with our lives — the truth that the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton learned back in the 1980s, from a Polish Catholic woman:
And she brought home to me, then and subsequently, what is perhaps the most important truth conveyed by religion, and one that Monsignor Gilbey, incidentally, had built onto the foundations of his life — the truth that sex is either consecration or desecration, with no neutral territory between, and that nothing matters more than customs, ceremonies and rites with which we lift the body above its material need and reshape it as soul.
Contra the Stonewall dogma, sexual pleasure is not a good in itself; it is either consecration or desecration. This is the divine wisdom that is the real gift to humanity — a liberating gift that Stonewall (and other decisive battles of the Sexual Revolution) stole from us.
sexual pleasure is not a good in itself