Some interesting discussion prompted by Ross Douthat on the gay marriage debate followed by the Patrol blog.

Here’s a comment I made there
I like to talk about “universal” marriage being a custom held in diverse cultures and times that while maintaining an incredible variety of rituals, customs and norms yet had a single idea at its core. Marriage is about the creation of legitimate heirs. Universal marriage therefore is a subset of property law. Christian marriage is a rather different thing. The irony of this debate is that SSM makes little sense in the context of universal marriage (apart from the contemporary American trend of creating a traditional facsimile using reproductive technology or adoption) while at the same time attempting to leverage some of the “value added” properties of Christian marriage, a meaning-witness-creation device.

I think Douthat is correct that we are seeing the culture fruit of the page having turned away from the Western/Christian ideal he lays out. The argument as to whether this “should” happen in the context of the US as secular nation vs. Christian nation (which is what the new-fundamentalism is about according to this article http://bit.ly/bpNN2f) is of course the subject for discussion.

Lots of questions and ironies remain. Is this in fact forcing Christians to adopt more of an “old Fundamentalism” approach to culture, meaning escaping it? Will the continual receding of Christian notions from the culture lead the gay community to abandon traditional Christian notions of marriage to which they are ascribing and we eventually see more of a classical approach which separates marriage (creation of legitimate heirs) from sex (lower classes not participating in marriage because of the diminished incentive for property issues, sex for recreation/need, etc.)?