Today, TGC runs part 1 of my two-part article on A New Fight for Marriage. Part 1 lays out the reasons I think the fight for marriage is currently on a losing track:

As Koppelman explains, all of Gergis’s talk about “conjugal union,” “coitus,” “reproduction,” and “the common good” comes across as obscure, irrelevant, and alienating. Koppelman shrewdly devotes chunks of his time to reading passages from Gergis’s book; he knows its descriptions of sexuality and marriage come across to the audience as bizarre. Even though the arguments are true—indeed, they are ironclad and unanswerable to anyone who accepts their initial premise—they are nonetheless driving people away from Gergis’s position rather than towards it.

To me, “conjugal union” sounds like some kind of cosmic phenomenon from Star Trek: “When the positronic wave signatures of the isotropic energy fields are aligned, they achieve a state of conjugal union.” “Spock, I’m a doctor, not a particle physicist!” Every time the leading advocates of marriage use this alien terminology, another young American goes over to the other side.

In part 2 I’ll lay out the first steps to what I think would be a winning strategy.