Heterosexual union is imbued with the sense that your partner's sexual nature is strange to you, a territory into which you intrude without prior knowledge and in which the other and not the self is the only reliable guide. This experience has profound repercussions for our sense of the danger and the mystery of sexual union, and these repercussions are surely part of what people have had in mind in clothing marriage as a sacrament, and the ceremony of marriage as a rite of passage from one form of safety to another. Traditional marriage was not only a rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood; nor was it only a way of endorsing and guaranteeing the raising of children. It was also a dramatization of sexual difference. Marriage kept the sexes at such a distance from each other that their coming together became an existential leap, rather than a passing experiment. The intentionality of desire was shaped by this, and even if the shaping was—at some deep level—a cultural and not a human universal, it endowed desire with its intrinsic nuptiality, and marriage with its transformatory goal. To regard gay marriage as simply another option within the institution is to ignore the fact that an institution shapes the motive for joining it. Marriage has grown around the idea of sexual difference and all that sexual difference means. To make this feature accidental rather than essential is to change marriage beyond recognition. Gays want marriage because they want the social endorsement that it signifies; but by admitting gay marriage we deprive marriage of its social meaning, as the blessing conferred by the unborn on the living. The pressure for gay marriage is, therefore, in a certain measure self-defeating. It resembles Henry VIII's move to gain ecclesiastical endorsement for his divorce, by making himself head of the Church. The Church that endorsed his divorce thereby ceased to be the Church whose endorsement he was seeking.
That does not alter the fact that gay marriage furthers the hidden tendency of the postmodern State, which is to rewrite all commitments as contracts between the living. It is a near certainty, therefore, that the American State, acting through the Supreme Court, will 'discover' a constitutional right to gay marriage just as it discovered constitutional rights to abortion and pornography, and just as it will discover, when asked, a right to no-fault divorce.
Those who are troubled by this, and who wish to register their protest, will have to struggle against powerful forms of censorship. People who dissent from what is fast becoming orthodoxy in the matter of 'gay rights' are now routinely accused of 'homophobia'. All over America there are appointment committees intent on examining candidates for suspected homophobia and summarily dismissing them once the accusation has been made: 'You can't have that woman pleading at the Bar, she is a Christian fundamentalist and a homophobe'; 'No, even if he is the world's authority on second dynasty hieroglyphs, you can't give him tenure, after that homophobic outburst last Friday'. This censorship will advance the cause of those who have made it their business to 'normalize' the idea of homosexual union. It will not be possible to resist it, any more than it has proved possible to resist the feminist censorship of the truth about sexual difference. But maybe it will be possible to entertain, between consenting adults in private, the thought that homosexual marriage is really no such thing.
(Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy [London and New York: Continuum, 2006], 101-2 [footnote omitted])
Note from KBJ: And now you know why I use quotation marks.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 