I see no reason to expect that homosexual couples will have (even!) the same emphasis on and belief in sexual exclusivity that married couples do today. In the post above “Question in Three Acts,” I’ll talk briefly (more on this tomorrow) about why that matters for heterosexual couples. For the moment I’ll just wonder whether gay activists really think marriage–an institution developed emphatically without homosexual couples in mind–is an appropriate model for homosexual relationships, or whether something more like friendship or blood-brotherhood (maybe?) would be more like what they’re looking for.

I find it interesting that both Andrew Sullivan and David Morrison have written a lot on the importance of friendship and the need to recover a strong sense of what it means to be a friend.

I obviously far prefer Morrison’s take, but I think the confluence of interest suggests a) a real lack in our society that b) is more likely to be discerned by people with same-sex attractions, precisely because friendship offers a model for loving relationships that is not marriage. Renewing an understanding of friendship might also help us see the flaws in the claim that barring same-sex couples from marriage is “denying them love.”

So that might be a positive project to work on, along with the more obvious positive project of renewing marriage in society at large (which desperately needs this renewal!) and the negative project of withstanding same-sex marriage.