I disagree. I think that "the radicals" lost.

To be sure, Christian opposition to gay marriage has alienated believers and secularists alike. The fallout from the fight has perhaps made our culture less Christian insofar as some number of people have left their churches over the issue (in part because a subset of traditionalists who are bigoted toward gays has been exposed–mistreatment of gays by some religious people has been a self-inflicted wound). But I remain a "bourgeois apologist for same-sex marriage as a conservative phenomenon" and dispute that same-sex marriage has struck a decisive blow against "the old order." The rapid legalization of same-sex marriage has, I think, been better for traditionalists than would all plausible alternatives in a society where gays are out-and-loved rather than closeted-or-persecuted.

One place to begin is a rainbow bumper sticker I saw earlier this week in Venice Beach, California, on a car that also advertised various slogans and causes of the far left:

The glass-half-empty traditionalist sees a slogan like this and thinks, "Oh goodness, marriage at its core is a procreative institution, and this movement seeks to sever that connection, transforming it into any long term contract between lovers."

That outlook would make more sense if not for the fact that heterosexuals long ago changed the meaning of marriage to encompass (for example) a thrice-married, post-vasectomy male and a post-menopausal female joining together in a union that excludes, via prenuptial agreement, most of their assets. In an alternative world where no one had yet conceived of same-sex nuptials, the U.S. would still operate under a notion of marriage that John Witte Jr., a leading scholar of marriage law and history in the Western world, summed up in a 2002 essay as "a sexual contract designed for the gratification of the individual parties."

The Supreme Court all but declared decades ago that civil marriage in America is not an institution where child-bearing or openness to children is presumed, he noted:

In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), for example, the Supreme Court struck down a state law banning the use of contraceptives by a married couple as a violation of their freedom to choose whether to have or to forgo children. In Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), the Court stated its rationale clearly: “The marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals, each with a separate emotional and intellectual makeup. If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwanted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting the person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”

Witte also observed that the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act of 1987 defined marriage simply as "a personal relationship between a man and a woman arising out of a civil contract to which the consent of the parties is essential." He went on to observe, "the Enlightenment ideal of marriage as a privately bargained contract between husband and wife about all their rights, goods, and interests has largely become a legal reality... The strong presumption today is that adult parties have free entrance into marital contracts, free exercise of marital relationships, and free exit from marriages once their contractual obligations are discharged."