Freedom And Marriage

Damon Linker counters Dreher over a report on open marriages among gay men in San Francisco:

What a fascinatingly bleak view of the human condition we find among sexual traditionalists: Traditional marriage is natural, and homosexuality is contrary to nature; but nature is so fragile that it needs to be backed up by unquestioning tradition, as well as by the force of law; the moment those traditional mores and legal sanctions are loosened, people begin to diverge from their own natures and conform to the unnatural practices of the deviants, thereby dissolving traditional marriage. This is why I’ve always had a perverse respect for those traditionalists who have been willing to follow their darkly pessimistic convictions all the way to the endto admit that they think traditional marriage is fundamentally incompatible with freedom. (And no, redefining freedom to mean “obedience” doesn’t count.)