Stanley Kurtz praised his article on the Standard’s website. I thought he got a number of things right. I think he got my own work wrong.

Bockhorn calls my article in the latest issue of NR “defeatist” on gay marriage (and I assume that’s how Maggie Gallagher viewed it as well). That is not an unreasonable characterization, I suppose: I do offer reasons for thinking that resisting gay marriage will be extremely difficult. Bockhorn does not dispute these reasons, and indeed seems to agree with them. He proceeds to write as though I were calling for social conservatives to surrender. This is not true. I didn’t call for anything.

My article was a neutral, descriptive account of the politics of gay marriage. A social conservative who reads it may decide to quit the fight against gay marriage as hopeless. Or he may decide to throw himself into the fight because gay marriage is closer to happening than he had previously realized. If he chooses this second course, he will be going into the fight with open eyes. (There is, of course, a third option: He may decide my analysis is incorrect.)

It is a little rich, in any case, for a Weekly Standard writer to be complaining that conservatives are not doing enough to fight gay marriage. Did anyone at the Standard, either in print or on the web, make the constitutional case for upholding sodomy laws before the Lawrence case was decided? Did anyone at the Standard, either in print or on the web, criticize the constitutional reasoning of the Supreme Court once it was decided? Has the Standard run anything on the decision’s implications for gay marriage other than Bockhorn’s article? I believe that the answer to all of these questions is no. Bockhorn challenges conservatives to support the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. The Standard has mentioned that proposal once, in an article in Oct. 2002, and never endorsed it editorially. If folks at the Standard want conservatives to engage on the issue of gay marriage, they could always try doing so themselves.