Ethics & Morality CURT RESPONSE TO STANLEY KURTZ

In the wake of Senator Rick Santorum's comments drawing a parallel between legalizing gay marriage and legalizing incest, Contributing Editor Stanley Kurtz offered his analysis of the issue of gay marriage in the April 30, 2003 issue of National Review Online.

According to Kurtz's convoluted logic, "The real danger of gay marriage is that it will undermine the taboo on adultery, thereby destroying the final bastion protecting marriage: the ethos of monogamy." Kurz, who is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, also maintains that gay marriage threatens monogamy in society because "...homosexual couples -- particularly male homosexual couples -- tend to see monogamy as nonessential, even to the most loyal and committed relationship." Finally, Kurtz suggests that legalizing gay marriage will lead society down the proverbial "slippery slope" toward legalized polygamy and polyamory, which he characterizes as undermining monogamy...

There would seem to be anecdotal evidence all around us that monogamy is an ongoing challenge for many heterosexual couples, and instances of heterosexual infidelity hardly require any "inspiration" from gay couples. The fact of the matter is that strictly monogamous heterosexual couples (meaning where neither partner ever violates that principle even once during the entire relationship) is probably much more of an exception than the rule.
The underlying fallacy of Kurtz's second argument is the belief that it is homosexuals who prefer not to confine themselves to the constraints of monogamy, when the truth of the matter is that men are ambivalent about lifelong monogamy (at least for themselves, anyway), and not homosexual men, in particular. The overwhelming majority of heterosexual men…