Arguing gay marriage.(letters to the editor)(Letter to the Editor)

For better or worse, social conservatives have provided a coherent rationale for limiting marriage to the union of one man and one woman. This limitation, we are told, is designed to maintain traditional family arrangements and create an ideal environment for child-rearing.

Midge Decter must have missed that memo. She argues ("An Amazing Pass," Nov. 8) that lesbian marriage is no big deal. "They are women," Decter writes, "and women are by nature monogamous, wishing to be mothers, for instance, and to bring up their children in stable households."

"The real issue here is with, and about, the men," she continues. "For men are not by nature monogamous--it is women who make them so." She concedes that "there have also been homosexual [male] couples who have famously lived together for years and years, sometimes indeed for life, but what heterosexuals would define as marital loyalty has little or nothing to do with it."

This argument is circular. One cannot expect the most committed and faithful gay couples to practice marital loyalty while denying them the freedom to marry.

If Decter can live with monogamous lesbian marriages, she can have no principled objection to equally faithful gay-male marriages. Conversely, according to Decter's thinking, promiscuous lesbians should be forbidden to wed, or their marriage licenses ...