At a picnic table in the backyard, he asked if I thought the debate should deal with what had happened in Washington. “What are you talking about?” I said. In transit, without access to TV or the Internet, I had not yet heard about the shooting of a security guard at the Washington headquarters of the Family Research Council, the conservative Christian group. People were speculating that a gay man was the culprit. (A suspect has been arrested and is awaiting a hearing.)

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should talk about it over dinner, then not deal with it during the debate itself.”

Terry Miller, Dan’s spouse, came out to offer me a drink. I eagerly accepted.

From then on, I did not stop drinking. It started with Terry’s Mai Tai, as Mr. Miller named his fabulous rum drink, and continued with the red wine that Mr. Brown politely brought when he arrived without his wife, who was pregnant with their eighth child, and then the white wine that Mr. Colwell provided to accompany dinner. (For those who are curious, we ate Northwest sockeye salmon with Washington sweet corn, heirloom tomatoes and new-potato gnocchi; dessert was roasted peaches with an oat-and-almond crumble.)

But even if I was no longer sober by the end of the meal, I still managed to exert enough discipline to hold the debate to an hour. It was dispiriting, but in an instructive way. Here were two Catholics — Mr. Savage born to the faith, Chicago Irish, the lapsed son of parochial schools; Mr. Brown of Quaker ancestry, but a Catholic since college, with a convert’s zeal — who could agree on nothing and could effect no change of heart in each other. They disagreed over whether Mr. Savage had the right to insult the Bible in front of high school students; about whether the New Testament endorsed slavery; and about whether the recent study by Mark Regnerus and its controversial conclusions about gay parents had any merit. (The hourlong debate can be seen on YouTube.)