Maggie Gallagher on Marriage: Keep Fighting

Maggie Gallagher reflects on the culture war and recent Supreme Court decisions in an interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

Marriage, after gay marriage, is an under-defined commitment to love and caretaking, whose public character and status is newly uncertain. Why love? Why sex? Why just two? What does this have to do with parenting? What other relationships have an equal right to be counted as marriage?

Gay-marriage advocates will work this out, or more likely ignore — with the exception of a few like David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch — these questions in favor of pursuing an ever more energetic strategy of using the power of law and culture to push new expanded equality norms around gay and transgender relationships.

. . . With Kennedy’s judgment, and his contempt of dissent, we’ve entered into a new era of the relationships between the American political order and traditional Judeo-Christian moral views.

(Link to Mark Steyn added.)

Is the fight over, then?

Will we concede the legitimacy of Kennedy’s fatwa against us, or will we respond with a sustained opposition — legal, political, cultural, and of the moral imagination?

I don’t believe in inevitability, I believe in human freedom and our power to shape the future. So it depends on us.