Now that the media have shared with us their joy over the advent of homosexual “marriage” in California, here’s the other shoe that will drop in the next few weeks.

Get used to this term: “The sky is not falling.”  It will be used by pro-gay spokespeople that the media showcase to make the point that nobody will be substantially affected.

Shortly after May 17, 2004, when Mitt Romney’s administration began handing out same-sex marriage licenses in Massachusetts despite no legislative action on the law, which was required under the Massachusetts Constitution, the media eagerly showcased gay activists who said, on cue, “See, the sky is not falling.”

I was debating the marriage issue on college campuses with former Human Rights Campaign leader Elizabeth Birch that spring and summer, and I recall her beginning one presentation by noting that the natural elements had remained intact in the Bay State following the beginning of “gay marriage.”

She assured the young audience, which soaked up her utterly illogical argument, that the “sun still came out, the birds still chirped and the flowers still bloomed,” or something to that effect.

Well, the birds chirped and the flowers bloomed in Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, as the American fleet lay smoldering.

Yes, sometimes it takes a few years before radical social changes wreak havoc, such as the fallout from the sexual revolution and the rise of the welfare state, which shattered families and led to epidemic levels of promiscuity, divorce, STDs and unwanted pregnancies. 

But the “see, nothing has changed?” argument is persuasive for “me-now” minds trained to see only the immediate and to look neither to the past nor the future as important reference points.

But gay activists are under no such illusions as to whether “gay marriage” will have social impact. Here are a few quotes that bear repeating, from my paper “The Case for Marriage,” which I wrote as director of the Culture & Family Institute at Concerned Women for America:

"A middle ground might be to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution."

-Michelangelo Signorile, “Bridal Wave,” OUT magazine, December/January 1994, p. 161.

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"[E]nlarging the concept to embrace same-sex couples would necessarily transform it into something new....Extending the right to marry to gay people -- that is, abolishing the traditional gender requirements of marriage -- can be one of the means, perhaps the principal one, through which the institution divests itself of the sexist trappings of the past."

-Tom Stoddard, quoted in Roberta Achtenberg, et al, “Approaching 2000: Meeting the Challenges to San Francisco's Families,” The Final Report of the Mayor’s Task Force on Family Policy, City and County of San Francisco, June 13, 1990, p.1.

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