"How Changes in Straight Marriage Paved the Way for Legal Gay Marriage."

An article by Jesse Walker at Reason (linked to this morning by Instapundit). Walker links to an article by historian Stephanie Coontz that describes the changes in marriage over time: Hetereosexual couples married based love and autonomous personal choice (instead of submitting to arranged marriages); heterosexual couples moved away from traditional gender roles; laws governing the obligations of heterosexual couples were rewritten with gender neutrality (to acknowledge the mutability of gender roles). These changes have made it harder to justify denying gay couples the choice to adopt the marriage format for their relationships.

Fine. I support same-sex marriage, and I like this argument in favor of it, as I like so many other arguments in favor of something I favor. But I want to layer in another topic. If opposite-sex marriage couples influence our understanding of same-sex couples, what about the reverse? Once same-sex couples are included in the norm, they will affect the norm.
In this context, let's take a closer look about what Dan Savage — the very influential advice columnist and media figure — has been saying for years. Savage, you need to understand, is himself gay, but he's always aimed his advice primarily at heterosexuals. That's the idea: a gay male has a useful perspective.

Savage has for 20 years been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage. In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.

Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest. Some people need more than one partner, he writes, just as some people need flirting, others need to be whipped, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission. In both cases, honesty is the best policy.

“I acknowledge the advantages of monogamy,” Savage told me, “when it comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But people in monogamous relationships have to be willing to meet me a quarter of the way and acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted.”

The view that we need a little less fidelity in marriages is dangerous for a gay-marriage advocate to hold. It feeds into the stereotype of gay men as compulsively promiscuous, and it gives ammunition to all the forces, religious and otherwise, who say that gay families will never be real families and that we had better stop them before they ruin what is left of marriage. But Savage says a more flexible attitude within marriage may be just what the straight community needs. Treating monogamy, rather than honesty or joy or humor, as the main indicator of a successful marriage gives people unrealistic expectations of themselves and their partners. And that, Savage says, destroys more families than it saves.

Much more at the link (which goes to a long NYT Magazine article from last year).