THE ROMANCE OF ERRATA: Some notes on the big gender post below.

1–I think that post focuses too much on pregnancy as a risk, rather than a reward. That doubtless reflects my volunteer job and my general bachelorette lifestyle, among other things. But the post should have had a much more positive view of pregnancy and childbearing.

2–Jim Henley is overreading me, here, though that’s partly my fault–the last para. of my post is really unclear, sorry. The post isn’t a persuasive argument against same-sex marriage in part for the fairly basic reason that it isn’t an argument against ssm at all. You can agree with all of it (except the Catholic one-liner at the beginning…) and still support ssm. That just isn’t what I was trying to talk about. I wanted to do a much more narrowly-focused post on sex differences and whether homosexual and heterosexual relationships are “the same.” Obviously, your position on those questions will affect your views of ssm, but, like I said, it’s not dispositive.

ETA: No, that’s not quite right. It was thinking hard about the meaning and societal implications of sex differences that led me to oppose same-sex marriage, so I do think this argument eventually goes there (among many other places it goes). But I wasn’t trying to take the argument all the way there in the “Romantic Comedies” post, so again, it isn’t a persuasive case against ssm at least in part because that isn’t what I was trying to write.

(If you do want a really good exchange on ssm, though, you cannot do better than the debate between Maggie Gallagher and Jonathan Rauch that you can find here.)

3–I do want to point out that I was talking about a level of friendship and non-sexual love that’s a lot more than “going to football games together or being fond of your siblings.” But I suspect that ranting more about the contemporary denigration of friendship would be riding a dead hobbyhorse, so I won’t. Well, maybe a little: Here’s Camassia on the “if it isn’t eros, it’s crap!” mindset–which I don’t think Jim shares; I just want to clarify that I’m talking about a larger conception of love between people who have no romantic relationship than his rhetoric in this one case acknowledges. I think he’ll find that he was misconstruing that paragraph as an anti-ssm argument, which threw off his reading on the broader “what is love?” points as well.

4–Anyway, I do appreciate the links and comments, from both Jim and Peiratikos (who connects my post with Love and Rockets!–there’s lots of wonderful comicsness in that post, and, in the comments, Rose catches a stupid turn of phrase on my part).