Making it possible for them to get married is, as I said, both very radical and very conservative. McArdle recognizes that...and tries to express it through the really extremely unconvincing idea of revolutionary neo-Victorianism. But though her conclusion is not especially convincing, the question she's trying to ask does have some resonance. That question being: What happens when gay people enter the institution of marriage? Is it radical? Is it conservative? Is it both?

The evidence from places where there is gay marriage is legal has, so far, suggested that there won't be any massive change either way—Canada does not seem to have become neo-Victorian, as far as I can tell. But it seems plausible that there might be more subtle changes over the long term. At the least, it seems like gay couples might help folks question some of the gendered assumptions that still often hover around marriage. The still fairly strong assumption that men should do the proposing and women the accepting or rejecting, for example, obviously makes little sense in terms of gay and lesbian couples, which might lead straight folks to wonder a bit more whether it makes sense for them.

More consequentially, gay marriage might put pressure on the noxious idea that the purpose of marriage is to allow domestic women to control the rambling horn-dog sexuality of men. As Alyssa Rosenberg writes, this vision of marriage is insulting to everyone—to women because it defines them as boring homemakers; to men because it defines them as irresponsible assholes. Gay and lesbian relationships, though, clearly don't follow this blueprint. In their traditionalism, they show that not only women crave domesticity, and they show that not only men crave adventure. None of which is likely to end stupid stereotypes or anything—but as a guy who quite likes watching the kid and making dinner, thank you, I personally appreciate the back up.

One could imagine other changes as well, perhaps. Gay and lesbian couples with adopted children could help make adoption more visible as an option for everybody (Dan Savage's popular book being a case in point, perhaps.) And maybe by situating marriage as compatible with social justice and equality, gay marriage could make the institution more popular with folks on the left who have, at least sometimes, viewed it with distrust, or seen it as the antithesis of those things. At the very least, I understand that final, nationwide acceptance of gay marriage will lead Brad and Angelina to tie the knot.

Hollywood power couples aside, it seems like, if gays and lesbians do change marriage, it won't be because "'confirmed bachelors' and maiden schoolteachers"—in McArdle's charming phrase—were the only ones keeping us from '50s-style stifling conformity. Rather, change will come, if it does, because straight people have figured out that gays and lesbians—our neighbors, our relatives, and our friends—have something to teach us about how to love and how to be married, just as gays and lesbians decided that straight people had something to teach them about both those things. And one of the things we maybe have to teach each other is that marriage is not, as McArdle would have it, a sexless bourgeois drag, nor an apocalyptic threat. Instead it is, like love, both conservative and radical—an institution which, I believe, again like love, will be more stable and more freeing as it grows.