WEDDED BLITZ.(The Talk of the Town)

The deliberations of the editorial board of the Baylor Lariat do not normally attract widespread notice beyond the environs of Waco, Texas--or within them, for that matter--but these are not normal times, and the Lariat's editorial the other Friday was not, in the opinion of some, a sufficiently normal editorial. After summarizing the events surrounding the current fuss over same-gender matrimony, the Lariat editors stated their view. "Gay couples should be granted the same equal rights to legal marriage as heterosexual couples," they wrote. "Like many heterosexual couples," they went on to conclude,

many gay couples share deep bonds of love, some so strong they've persevered years of discrimination for their choice to co-habitate with and date one another. Just as it isn't fair to discriminate against someone for their skin color, heritage or religious beliefs, it isn't fair to discriminate against someone for their sexual orientation. Shouldn't gay couples be allowed to enjoy the benefits and happiness of marriage, too?

(This, by the way, was followed by a boldface tagline: editorial board vote: 5-2. Wouldn't it be nice if the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal practiced this sort of transparency?)

The Baylor Lariat is the campus newspaper of Baylor University. Baylor, with fourteen thousand students, describes itself as "the oldest institution of higher learning in the state and the largest Baptist university in the world," and is a bastion of Christian conservatism.

The unchristian kind, too, apparently. The president of Baylor, Robert B. Sloan, Jr., quickly lowered the boom. "Espousing in a Baylor publication a view that is so out of touch with traditional Christian teachings is not only unwelcome, it comes dangerously close to violating University policy, as published in the Student Handbook, prohibiting the advocacy of any understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching," President Sloan stated, adding darkly, "The Student Publications Board will be addressing this matter with the Lariat staff as soon as possible." Sure enough, that same day, the Student Publications Board--which evidently functions in the Baylor context the way the Ideology Department of the Communist Party used to function in the Soviet context--announced that the Lariat had indeed violated "policy" and assured the world that "the guidelines have been reviewed with the Lariat staff, so that they will be able to avoid this error in the future."

It was no great surprise that the Lariat's foray into dissidence was promptly squelched. What was startling was that such a foray, in such a place, was ventured at all. It was more startling, in its way, than the pro-gay-marriage ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, three weeks earlier. Waco, after all, is far from Boston. And the vote in the Supreme Judicial Court was narrower--4-3, not 5-2.

The Lariat fracas is a small part of a large drama, but it is emblematic of an essential feature of the gay-marriage debate: the most salient divisions are not religious, political, or "cultural" but generational. To talk to younger people is to realize that for most of them, including many young conservatives, such notions as the idea that homosexuality is shameful, that it is a voluntary and/or contagious "life-style choice," or that it is some sort of threat to something or other (public order, the family, civilization, God) are simply bizarre curios from the past, like the belief that masturbation causes blindness. And, for what it's worth, anecdotal impressions ...