Support for SSM is not compatable with support for the preferential status of marriage. It is incompatable with strengthening marriage.

The pro-marriage side has been at work on these other issues that do impact marriage. The SSM side — not so much. SSM is symbolism and not the hard stuff of affirming a social institution in everyday terms. At every turn the SSM idea will be a roadblock — a deadend — for effectively strengthening marriage. Even Blankenhorn acknowledges that SSM is an effacement and that is is a conceptual mess.

If he gave up after just 3 years of participating in the SSM issue, why does he imagine that his two decades of pro-marriage advocacy will suddenly succeed where he has failed before?

I think he now underestimates the symbolism of SSM and its impact on the social institution. We’ll see, I suppose.

Yet it’s not something I would sign … the result, and perhaps in some cases the intent [of The Call], is to reduce or deflate opposition to the reinvention of marriage through the inclusion of same-sex couples, by the seductive call to do something more important and more effective. It’s not just a call to defend marriage, it’s a call to give up working for marriage as traditionally understood.

Perhaps I’ve missed something, but I did not understand participation in The Call to require surrendering any point of view or any advocacy. I understood that it merely looked for opportunities to strengthen marriage regardless of people’s views on same-sex marriage. It creates a forum to explore what can be done to strengthen marriage while the debate about same-sex marriage rages in other forums — but the Call does not imply the elimination of those other forums.

More fundamentally, some of us believe that the effort to strengthen marriage while redefining it is ultimately pointless—that, to put it another way, gay marriage is itself one of the problems the Call ought to engage.

Mills seems to say that same-sex marriage is a necessary issue to be resolved in any discussion of marriage policy, and all other issues must inevitably be held hostage to that one. The fact that divorce rates have risen and fallen, that kids are increasingly born out of wedlock, that these problems correlate with social class, and that all of these dynamics preceded the adoption of same-sex marriage in the United States are all irrelevant, according to Mills. Unless and until we resolve the same-sex marriage issue, we are helpless to address any other issue.

If this is Mills’s view, he is right to dismiss participation in The Call. It just seems like an implausible view.

And I think that reminding people that marriage approves and allows conception, and affirming that men are necessary to reproduce, would strengthen marriage and make it something people wanted to do and respect more.

How?

(I note that you say “civil marriage”, not “same-sex marriage.” Does that mean that you’d prefer marriage to be an exclusively religious rite?)

The Catholic Faith created Europe, with families, not concubinage, and the entire system of wealth and property benefited.

Too bad American and Western History have been taken out of required coursework for high
schools.

The decay of family life hits the poor, and uninvolved first, and then spreads upward into the ranks of the middle and upper classes. The gays want us to accept their lifestyle and do not care if civil marriage undermines the old, Christian bourgeoisie.

Sex is more important than the common good. Therefore, I disagree with the conclusion of the argument here.

What percentage of poor/working class men have jobs that realistically enable marriage and childbearing without government assistance (if that is the goal) even with a working wife?

I entered engineering so I could support myself without marrying, if needed.

Many poor/working class women will remain childless if they hold to standards described here. I was willing to do it, but not all women are.

What would happen to birth rates, I wonder?

I note this document does not really tell us what marriage is.