Liberals display a revealing contradiction in their attitudes toward marriage. With male-female couples, they tend to treat marriage as an outmoded, irrelevant institution—supporting trends toward non-marital cohabitation, and shrugging at the 40 percent of American babies who now arrive to unmarried mothers.

Hollywood even honors “courageous” couples who raise their children without the benefit of matrimony, illustrating the lyrics to the old song saying “we don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall keeping us tied and true.”

But when it comes to same-sex couples, liberals treat marriage as essential–suggesting no relationship can be complete without it. Why should marriage be essential for gays, but dispensable for straights? Could it be that unions producing biological offspring have permanent consequences even without marriage licenses, but same-sex connections need governmental sanction to confer a sense of long-term importance?