My comments in bold text.

I thank Andrew Sullivan for his considered response in TNR Online to my recent Wall Street Journal article on gay marriage. I have long respected Sullivan for his eminently sensible and often fresh writing on so many cultural and political issues. In fact, I thought of him frequently as I wrote the article on gay marriage, and wondered what his response might be. Now I know, and would like to briefly respond to him.

Let's say we agree that gay marriage should be a social or legislative question. How does those against it even in this context stand up? Not very well -- in fact, I am generally appalled at the shallow reasoning involved. This is not just a matter of disagreement, such as capital punishment, but a matter of not understanding how the argument can even be believably made. It just seems to turn on anti-homosexual bias. I offer this essay with my comments as an example, noting the author is a respected voice in matters of social policy.

Sullivan disagrees with my contention that gay marriage is not really a civil rights issue by referring to the famous Loving v Virginia miscegenation case in which Earl Warren says, "Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man." Sullivan then adds an addendum of his own: "The right to marry whomever you wish is a fundamental civil right." This, of course, is simply not true and in no way reflects Warren's meaning. You may not marry your sister or your pet even if you wish to, and this bar to your wishes is not considered a denial of civil rights. Because marriage is defined as a heterosexual institution, its exclusion of gay unions doesn't really qualify as a denial of rights. Gays have the same right to marry as heterosexuals as long as they marry the opposite gender--as many do. If the gay marriage movement succeeds in expanding the definition of marriage to include gay unions, and if gays are then still prohibited from marrying, then we would have a clear civil rights issue. As things stand there really is no precedent or "jurisprudence" on the side of gay marriage, only on the right of all citizens to heterosexual marriage. The Loving case only made the point that interracial marriage is no bar to this right.

How exactly did the author disprove that gay marriage is a "civil rights issue?" The fact you can exaggerate the true breadth of Sullivan's argument aside, marriage is a civil right, and it is being protected in a discriminatory way. The very issue at hand is how legitimate this might be. Loving is but one of a number of cases that determined various illegitimate classifications used to bar marriage (others included poverty and incarceration; surely other examples can be imagined -- religion would be an obvious one). Sex or sexual orientationcan quite arguably be considered another. And, yes, it's partly a definitional problem -- if the definition is based on an arbitrary classification. For instance, once upon a time you were only married if the church did the honors. Therefore, religious tests helped define marriage. They cannot today, and perhaps, nor can sexual orientation.

Sullivan then compares the old arguments against interracial marriage to my argument against gay marriage. And this points to an important theme of my argument: Racial difference is an innocuous human difference that in no way redefines the heterosexual nature of marriage or effects its procreative function. Interracial marriage has no effect on the institution of marriage. But when marriage is redefined to include homosexuality, it ends the heterosexual definition of marriage and moves marriage farther away from its grounding in procreation. It effectively makes marriage an institution more purely devoted to romantic love and adult fulfillment than to the heavier and more selfless responsibilities surrounding procreation. Of course, adult love and the responsibilities surrounding procreation are not mutually exclusive, but the gravity of marriage as an institution comes from its demand that love be negotiated through these larger responsibilities.

Steele's assumption that marriage turns on heterosexual procreation leads him to suggest that interracial marriage has no effect on the institution. This suggests the shallow nature of such a definition because when you allow interracial couples (or interreligious and so forth) to marry, you most definitely affect the institution. The expansion of those allowed to enter a particular institution, especially when it changes the makeup of the class in notable ways, usually affects it in any number of ways. The social effects, negative or not, interracial marriage leads to is evident -- it's one reason why it was once barred in the first place! So, yes, homosexual marriage will affect the institution, but so does removing other bars once in place.

To be sure, there are childless heterosexual couples and homosexual couples with children. But to define an institution as important to society as marriage by exceptions to the norms of both sexual orientations--rather than by the norms themselves--makes little sense. It could be argued that marriage is quite literally an outgrowth of heterosexuality itself, an institution that follows from nature's requirement that men and women sexually merge to perpetuate the human species.

It amazes me how people, exceptions abounding notwithstanding, suggest marriage has to be tied to procreation. Marriage has never been so shallowly observed, and it is appalling that some claim otherwise. It has from times immemorial also been used to form unions based on love/affection, the needs of the partner, to protect property, unite different groups (or nations), and so forth. The argument against gay marriage has to not only ignore these reasons, but the fact that homosexual couples have children (and currently have ways to procreate) has to be explained away as well! So, even raising children per se is not enough for the anti-gay marriage crowd. How such a miserly definition of marriage actually doesn't harm the institution is unclear to me.

Sullivan argues that marriage encourages "stability, fidelity, and family among homosexuals." I don't know. It is certainly doing less and less of this among heterosexuals. But, in any case, the stabilizing features of marriage have evolved over the millennia to protect children and procreation from the vicissitudes of adult love. How many 50's style marriages found stability only for "the sake of the children"? How many 70's, 80's, and 90's marriages ended because children and procreation became secondary to adult fulfillment? The point is that marriage offers the features Sullivan wants for homosexuals only when it is very narrowly--often repressively--grounded in heterosexuality, procreation, and the socialization of children. When it is defined, as Sullivan says he would have it be, around "the unifying experience of love," it becomes nearly as fickle as love itself--a nasty fight, a single betrayal away from dissolution. Marriage brings "stability" to love by humbling it, by making it often less important than the responsibilities to family and community.

Heterosexual marriage always offered the choice of not having children, while quite a few homosexual couples raise children, at times those they "had" together. So how does allowing homosexuals to marry suddenly result in less respect for "responsibilities to family and community?" Steele appears to be arguing for something truly radical -- not only does he want to deny the right of homosexuals to marry, he wants to deny the right of heterosexuals to marry for reasons other than having children. He wants some pseudo-ideal "50's style" marriage, which is not only a pipe dream, but troubling for reasons independant of homosexuality. It suggests those who argue those against homosexual marriage have a truly radical agenda are not totally off base.

When love and fulfillment are of first importance, marriage weakens as an institution, as the high divorce rates of recent decades illustrate. Homosexual unions are, by nature's grace, naturally less burdened by the very responsibilities that heterosexuals have been running from in marriage for decades now. The truth is that heterosexuals have been moving marriage toward the more exclusively adult-focused relationships that gays have always had--relationships that turn more narrowly on love, attraction, and fulfillment. Cohabitation is now virtually a norm among young heterosexuals, and adult happiness is more the test of marriages today than family stability. So the conundrum for the gay marriage movement is that marriage has already declined from its more selfless and stable era into something very much like what gays already have.

And so his true colors show. The trouble in part is the "solution" does not really help him. Homosexual unions are not really too much less "burdened," given many heterosexual couples are not either, while many homosexual couples have families as well. It's noteworthy how he keeps ignoring this fact. The final sentence is patently false in any number of ways, including legal protections, social respect, and ultimately personal belief. Steele ironically wants to continue allowing homosexual couples to contnue their "selfish" arrangements by not allowing them entry into an institution that brings forth various obligations. I find this strangely counterproductive, especially given blocking entry surely doesn't seem to be helping the "problem" of the current state of marriage too much.

So what, then, is the big deal? Why not gay marriages if society has already moved to a place where romantic unions--of all kinds--are now first of all about adult love? One answer is that marriage, despite its decline, will always be the basis of the single most important institution in the human condition--the family. This is the institution that socializes human beings, prepares them (or fails to) for all other human activities. Just because marriage has now declined is no reason to push it even further toward the self-preoccupations of adult love and away from its family focus.

What exactly gives society the right to arbitrarily allow heterosexuals to center on "adult love," while in the process hindering the stability of families of homosexuals? I would also note that again Steele is trying to inject a more radical agenda than he implies. The implication after all is that "family" is some artificial "50s model," not the truly diverse model that is honored today. As Lynn Johnson, the author of the comic strip "For Better or For Else" said: family is more than "birth, genetics, who looks like or acts like" each other. "A family is a group of individuals who love, hate, trust, question, need, console, and depend on one another as they grow and mature and learn how to give a little more, take a little less ... all in the same environment, whatever or wherever it may be."

The black American family has sadly become an international model of what happens when marriage and family weaken. It was the black family that brought blacks through slavery and a century of segregation. But now, 40 years into freedom, we are a striking example of how impossible it is to help communities where marriage and traditional families have all but disappeared. Black women marry at half the rate and divorce at twice the rate of white women. Without the bedrock institution of family, there is no apparatus for outside interventions to attach to or be supported by. What social program will compensate for a nationwide black illegitimacy rate of 70 percent--and nearly 90 percent in certain inner cities?

It is almost offensive, oh let's just say it is offensive, to try to use the tragedy of black illegitimacy to defend discrimination against homosexuals.

Sullivan could reasonably say that the black experience is no argument against gay marriage. But it is precisely the rather dreamy ideology of marriage by which he supports gay marriage that would further weaken the institution for the most vulnerable. He wants marriage to "integrate" disparate groups into a common community out of its "impulse to unity" and its dedication "to affirming what we have in common." Homosexuality should not be "balkanized" and "separated." But marriage has no obligation whatsoever to "integrate" gays, blacks, or any other group into society. Moreover, it has no power to do this. Its functions are at once narrower and more profound: the perpetuation of the human species, the launching of family life, the nurturing and socialization of youth, and even the survival of whole peoples and nations when tyranny and cataclysm collapse all other institutions. But marriage does not do equality or social engineering. It is not a democracy or a social leveler or an intervention.

How exactly do we not "separate" homosexuals by denying them a right heterosexuals have? Marriage by general definition, Steele's desire to ignore it aside, "integrates" groups -- it is a union of two different individuals, and the taboo against incest is largely in place to promote this difference. This is one reason why allowing interracial marriage was so important -- it had the "power" to unite the races, to look beyond color, to a deeper, more important aspect of our characters. Mr. and Mrs. Loving wanted to marry because they loved each other. Procreation was not their primary concern. Finally, it is aggravating that Steele claims "marriage does not do ... social engineering," after promoting it just for that reason! He thinks the procreative aspect of marriage is necessary to promote an important institution in society. That sounds like "social engineering" to me. What hypocrisy. Or, rather, bias.

Marriage will always be heterosexual because it exists to manage the explosive natural force of male-female sex. It socializes that inherently creative force into that most fundamental of human institutions, the family. Heterosexuality is not imposed on marriage as an exclusionary ideology; it is the same thing as marriage. Homosexuality, on its own, would never generate all the complex social and cultural apparatus of family. It is impotent precisely where heterosexuality is potent; and marriage evolved out of a struggle with this potency. Without this potency, homosexuality is naturally skewed more toward adult love and fulfillment. There is nothing wrong with this. But marriage today is already declining from too much emphasis on love and too little on its role as a civilizing institution.

Saying things does not make it so. I thought marriage doesn't "socialize." Heterosexuality alone is not marriage; what about incest? Homosexuality, the forces of society notwithstanding, is doing a pretty good job promoting it's own form of family life. Yes, something apparently is wrong with "adult love and fulfillment," since you don't want marriage to be based upon it. Again, "civilizing institution" sounds like social engineering. It also ignores the power of marriage to civilize gays -- Andrew Sullivan has written much on how valuable it is in causing gay men to settle down. The whole paragraph is patently false. So false it is almost obscene.

I will stand by my original point, that stigmatization--not the inaccessibility of marriage--is the great oppression in gay life. Stigmatization prevents the integration that Sullivan rightly hopes for. It is what "balkanizes" and "separates" gays even in their own families--families that fear the stigma reverberating to them. I believe the stigmatization of homosexuals is evil and in no way contributes to the moral health of society. But marriage will not end stigmatization. The instant gays marry, the popular culture will invent a litany of ugly names for such unions, which will then be marked out and stigmatized in their own right.

Inaccessibility of marriage furthers stigmatization. Surely, just as in the case of Loving v. Virginia, marriage alone won't end discrimination. So what?

We blacks won our civil rights decades ago, but we still face stigma. And we, too, keep making the mistake of thinking that we can overcome stigmatization as inferiors by fighting for civil rights. But it doesn't work. We will have to become individuals, making the kind of life we want for ourselves without apology or recrimination or conceit. And then one day, the stigma will look absurd for its distance from reality.

Well, if Steele doesn't think civil rights is important, I leave him to his fantasy land. I wonder if he can chew gum and walk at the same time. All the same, Steele wants to block homosexuals from "making the kind of life" they want for themselves in an important way. This is where civil rights come into play. I again do no understand the rationality of such reasoning, and nor do many others. It is ultimately hurts the movement of understanding across the social divide.

Sullivan accuses me of backtracking as an integrationist. But I think I will accuse him of the same thing, of backsliding a little from his usual faith in freedom and the individual. I always liked that he didn't wear being gay on his sleeve. But the gay marriage debate has drawn him into clamorous protest. At the end of his piece he generously holds out hope for me, and now I will return the favor. I hope Andrew Sullivan will continue to be a model of the individualism and responsibility that made him such an unself-conscious refutation of his group's stigma.

Other do argue that Sullivan puts to much emphasis on marriage. All the same, it is an important aspect of freedom and individual choice. The whole debate is addressed to the point that it is not purely a heterosexual institution. Steele should look in the mirror, and stop wearing his (procreative) heterosexuality on his sleeve.

Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution

He also is quite good at blinding himself to the truth. I suggest he do some more research into it.