One constant feature of the debate over allowing gay couples to settle down and get married has been Stanley Kurtz's persistent efforts to portray this essentially conservative idea as a leftist Trojan horse for polygamy, the end of the family, and God knows what else. Kurtz is even more slippery than Ramesh Ponnuru on many of these points. Jonathan Rauch calmly dissects them here. There is no plausible evidence that allowing gay couples legal equality has either caused any decline in heterosexual marriage or even correlates with it.