MINORITY REPORTS: One of the questions you hear a lot in the same-sex marriage debate is, “How can such a small minority of people actually affect the vast majority of marriages?” There are at least three reasons to think it could.

1) American culture has always been strongly affected by minorities. I wrote about black culture’s impact on the broader culture here. Andrew Sullivan recently wrote, “And, as with most developments in gay culture, they [= ‘bears’] could well influence straight culture as well”; Michael Bronski, a radical queer theorist, makes the same point in his Pleasure Principle. I don’t think it’s disputable that the most prominent Catholic voice on same-sex marriage is Andrew Sullivan’s (closely followed by Rick Santorum, I suppose…). Minorities have an impact on us.

2) The push for same-sex marriage in many ways represents a minority seizing on and promoting some of the mistakes of the majority–thus reinforcing the majority’s worse tendencies. In pushing for an ad hoc, “do it yourself,” atomistic-adults-making-contracts view of marriage, gay activists are just picking up a thread of argument and policy that was initially begun by and for heterosexual couples. “Marriage is society’s way of honoring adults’ sexual and romantic desires”: That isn’t something new. It’s just the divorce culture again. So given that this all started in the majority, I don’t see why we should expect the majority to remain pristinely sealed away from it now.

3) Finally, same-sex marriage would represent a change in the ideal of marriage. The rise of unilateral no-fault divorce is generally discussed not as an ideal but as an often tragic response to marriage failure. We can debate that, but it’s very different from changing what the ideal marriage is. (I’ll talk more about why the ideal matters in the “mechanism” post tomorrow.)