No doubt the silence stemmed from the fact that this story appeared on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, but I’m really surprised the front page article in the NYT on gay marriage in Canada hasn’t sparked more of a reaction. It speaks directly to the arguments of Frum, Kurtz, Derb and others — and gives them a great deal of ammo. Gays in Canada don’t want marriage because marriage is “too conservative” for folks who don’t believe in such things as monogamy. Here’s a quote worth pondering:

“Ambiguity is a good word for the feeling among gays about marriage,” said Mitchel Raphael, editor in chief of Fab, a popular gay magazine in Toronto. “I’d be for marriage if I thought gay people would challenge and change the institution and not buy into the traditional meaning of `till death do us part’ and monogamy forever. We should be Oscar Wildes and not like everyone else watching the play.”

Fine, fine. But if that’s the attitude toward marriage, they shouldn’t have marriage as an option. This just demonstrates how the analogy to blacks is so flawed. Blacks didn’t say they wanted to change the institution of marriage when they sought to overturn interracial marriage. Jackie Robinson didn’t want to change the rules of baseball, he wanted to play by the rules of baseball.