Anti-Marriage Futility

In this month’s Reason, Julian Sanchez tracks the ongoing battle over gay parenting. One quote, I think, nicely captures the bizarreness of the anti-gay-adoption position: “many policies don’t prevent gay couples from raising children; they just make life more difficult for gay parents and their children.” Indeed, barring serious intrusions by the state into the American household—intrusions that no doubt the James Dobson crowd is mulling over right this very second—it’s virtually impossible to prevent gay couples from raising children. So the net effect of the crusade against gay marriage will be that gay couples end up raising kids out of wedlock, and many will become, as Jonathan Rauch once put it, “walking billboards for the joys of co-habitation.” Now this is just a guess, but it seems that that trend will end up undermining the “institution of marriage” far more than equality for all couples ever would.