"It’s possible, I think, to affirm same-sex marriage in terms of what marriage is: domestic partnership, the context for disciplining our sexual desires to serve the higher end of a permansent bond, monogamy as an intrinsic good. That’s a truncated version of the traditional view, but it’s a view."
While I agree that this is the strongest case for re-defining marriage, the argument is nevertheless ontologically contradictory and unreasonable.
One cannot reasonably argue for marital “revisions” or re-definitions “in terms of what marriage is” because it is inherently, ontologically, impossible to re-define marriage "in terms of what marriage is."
If we change one or two terms of marriage, we ontologically change what marriage is. Any re-definition of marriage must inherently, ontologically, deconstruct the “terms of what marriage is”—terms that uniquely correspond to the language engrained in the conjugal-procreative-union of one man and one woman as such.
While not every husband and wife become parents, the generation of future citizens depends on the procreative potential uniquely embedded in the marital-conjugal-act between man and woman as such.
Other permanent relationships, sexual or non-sexual, may benefit the common good in some sense, but only marriage, as given between one man and one woman, holds such direct consequences for the continuance of society. The mere fact of sexual-involvement among adults in a “straight” relationship doesn’t naturally carry a necessity to legally enshrine such relationships—it is arbitrary to offer such legal-bondage to sexually-involved adults, in non-abusive sexual relations, and to exclude ones in non-abusive committed non-sexual relationships. Laws against sexual-abuse are necessary in any context—it is unclear why that creates a pretext to legally-enshrine non-abusive homosexual relationships as marriages.
Marriage, on the other hand, uniquely carries the potential of something greater than the man and woman--the potential of another life, a new human being wholly dependent on her parents. In our age of "freedom-of-indifference" in which the human person's natural dependence is an unfashionable concept, we cannot afford to leave marriage, and consequently the procreation and well-being of future generations, to the subjective whims of bourgeois adults.
