Jon Rowe
commitment in an emotional and sexual world which often pulls us away from that. It encourages shared sacrifice; it instills the disciplines of shared living; it promotes thrift; it integrates gay people into their own families and society; it harms no-one. In that sense I'm a weak libertarian, believing in a minimal state that can nonetheless encourage core shared values and social goods and treats the equal inclusion of minorities as something worth sacrificing for. That's the social conservative side of marriage equality – and the evolution of gay culture even in the past decade shows how that could occur, especially as the first generation of gay kids grows up knowing in advance that marriage is an option.
In fact, a great deal of this symbolism has to do with gay kids more than adults. If you are part of a family and your society tells you at an early age that you can have no family, no spouse and no integration into the world alongside your brothers and sisters in the future as an adult, that's a brutal psychic wound that leads to all sorts of subsequent problems and pathologies. I'd rather help mitigate that for the sake of some desperate young people, often isolated and alone and give them a chance for a solid future, with their families and communities as they have grown up in them. That's why I'm not a full-bore libertarian. And that's why marriage equality remains as much a conservative cause as a liberal one.
Secondly, Jon's solution is simply quixotic to me: