This is unquestionably one of the most thoughtful posts on the gay marriage question I’ve ever read. It’s a welcome antidote to the ugly insults of some libertarian bloggers. I’m grateful to Glenn Reynold for linking to it, although it cuts against his own policy inclinations. Yes, this argument does tell in favor of those who oppose gay marriage. Yet I believe Jane Galt (Megan McArdle) when she says that her thoughts do not finally decide this difficult question. What Galt does instead is transform the argument over gay marriage into a respectable intellectual debate about a complex social problem. Too bad so many proponents of same-sex marriage have shut off debate by pretending that there’s no respectable case to be made on the other side. The one place I might differ with the author is on her notion that proponents of gay marriage are simply extrapolating too readily from their own circumstances. I think the difficulty goes deeper than that. The root of the problem is an inability to understand that culture and society exist–that these entities are more than mere aggregates of isolated individuals. That (along with the fact of childhood dependence) is the Achilles heel of libertarianism