By Tara Servatius
Giddy after the recent legalization of gay marriage in New York, the editors at the New York Times are laying out the left's post-gay marriage agenda in the paper's pages for all to see.
What they clearly want is a country that is sexually unrecognizable from the one we live in today, one where marital infidelity is accepted as a lifestyle choice and actually celebrated, and traditional marriage is legally marginalized and removed from the public square.
Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat essentially laid out the cultural side of the left's and the Times' post-gay marriage agenda in a July column.
Gay marriage supporters called liberationists "hope that gay marriage will help knock marriage off its cultural pedestal altogether," Douthat explained.
To liberationists, if traditional marriage becomes the "gold standard" for relationships both gay and straight, the gay marriage movement will have "failed in its deeper mission," which he describes as introducing a "greater freedom than can be found in the one-size-fits-all rules of marriage."
The apparent hope is that legalized gay marriages will be more openly sexually promiscuous than straight marriage, providing an example that would then influence heterosexual couples to adopt the same open-marriage lifestyle.
In a June article called "Married, With Infidelities," the Times used gay activist and columnist Dan Savage's open marriage as the new model for straight marriages that should take root culturally from the legalization of gay marriage.
In the article the Times praised Savage for arguing against the American obsession with strict fidelity. "In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community's tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness," the Times article reads.
"A more flexible attitude within marriage may be just what the straight community needs," the article continues. "Treating monogamy, rather than honesty or joy or humor, as the main indicator of a successful marriage gives people unrealistic expectations of themselves and their partners."
While straight marriage has its share of infidelity, studies show that gay male marriages are often very different from traditional straight marriages. Gay partnerships are far more culturally accepting of infidelity before the fact, and in many it is even expected. According to the book Sex in America: A Definitive Survey, 100 percent of male gay couples in the study experienced infidelity in their relationships in the first five years and those who stayed together past the 10-year mark did so only by accepting the painful reality of infidelity in their relationships. Some 85 percentof the couples reported that their greatest relationship problems centered on issues related to outside relationships.
That's the cultural side of the left's new battle to take down marriage. In court, the new, post-gay marriage goal of the left will apparently be to attempt to remove marriage, and any special legal significance that comes with it, from the public square in much the same way they've sought to strip out God.
Before the new gay marriage law even hit the books in New York, Columbia University Law Professor Katherine M. Franke, a gay marriage supporter, was championing the next step.
"While many in our community have worked hard to secure the right of same-sex couples to marry, others of us have been working equally hard to develop alternatives to marriage," Franke explained in the Times:
Winning the right to marry is one thing; being forced to marry is quite another. How's that? If the rollout of marriage equality in other states, like Massachusetts, is any guide, lesbian and gay people who have obtained health and other benefits for their domestic partners will be required by both public and private employers to marry their partners in order to keep those rights. In other words, "winning" the right to marry may mean "losing" the rights we have now as domestic partners, as we'll be folded into the all-or-nothing world of marriage ... This moment provides an opportunity to reconsider whether we ought to force people to marry -- whether they be gay or straight -- to have their committed relationships recognized and valued.You can see where they're going with this.
As gay marriage becomes more firmly established, the next set of lawsuits will be discrimination claims by domestic partners against any institution that legally recognizes marriage in a bid to put domestic partnership on an equal legal footing with marriage. Franke and others like her want the rest of the country to operate like New York City, where same-sex and opposite-sex couples can by law register as domestic partners and are entitled to the same benefits as married couples.
The acceptance of infidelity theme has been subtly pushed at the Times for over a year now. The paper caused major controversy in December when it fawningly profiled the marriage of a homewrecking couple, who met at the school their children both attended while married to other spouses, in the "Vows" section of its bridal guide.
But married couples aren't the only targets for the Times' sexual revolution. The paper just printed a piece suggesting that parents follow the Dutch model and allow their teenaged kids to bring their partners home for sex so they don't have to sneak around. So far, the Times hasn't been clear on whether mom and dad should go out to meet their own extramarital partners for sex, or whether they should bring them home, too, for one big family sleepover.
