The single best article I have ever read on the subject of Gay Marriage brings in important topics left unsaid by other excellent commentators that have come before.
Sam Schulman hits upon the issue of kinship and the fact that in gay marriage, the issue of kinship and extended family unit building is irrelevant.
He also effectively asks the question that so many ignore "what comes next?" His phrasing is clear
"As kinship fails to be relevant to gays, it will become fashionable to discredit it for everyone. The irrelevance of marriage to gay people will create a series of perfectly reasonable, perfectly unanswerable questions: If gays can aim at marriage, yet do without it equally well, who are we to demand it of one another? Who are women to demand it of men? Who are parents to demand it of their children's lovers--or to prohibit their children from taking lovers until parents decide arbitrarily they are "mature" or "ready"? By what right can government demand that citizens obey arbitrary and culturally specific kinship rules--rules about incest and the age of consent, rules that limit marriage to twosomes? Mediocre lawyers can create a fiction called gay marriage, but their idealism can't compel gay lovers to find it useful. But talented lawyers will be very efficient at challenging the complicated, incoherent, culturally relative survival from our most primitive social organization we call kinship. The whole set of fundamental, irrational assumptions that make marriage such a burden and such a civilizing force can easily be undone."
The "what comes next" question often undoes liberal or leftist ideas. In the case of gay marriage it is often unclear what actually follows from lifting the restriction. Sam Schulman paints a clear picture.
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