I don’t want to get too deep back into the gay marriage stuff. But I thought it might be helpful to point out something: just because queer radicals — or whatever they’re called — want to open the floodgates to let the entire Star Wars cantina into the institution of marriage does not mean they will be successful (and again, I’m not in favor of same-sex marriages, but I do favor some compromise on unions).

First of all, the radicals are right that marriage — same sex or hetero — is an inherently conservative institution. The slippery slopists too often take for granted that pro-marriage homosexuals will be enemies in the fight against polyamory, incestuous marriage and the like. But it’s just as likely that many of these folks would be allies in such a fight — as the radicals fear. It is human nature to protect what you have. And I suspect that many same-sex couples would suddenly become quite “conservative” on some of these other assaults.

Second, anti-marriage radicals have not won their arguments on purely heterosexual terms either. For example, when I was the producer of the PBS series “Think Tank,” we did a show on whether divorce is too easy. One of our guests was Ellen Willis, a radical feminist, left-libertarian. I don’t have the transcript, but she made one incredibly memorable comment which has always stuck with me. The gist of it was that when she was younger she’d hoped to have children one day in a communal arrangement where her neighbors and friends saw no distinctions between her children and their own. My child is your child and vice versa. She was dismayed that when she finally did have children no such communities existed. Of course, this runs entirely counter to human nature and is baldly absurd. I remember thinking at the time that this was how certain breeds of penguin raise their offspring. If a mommy penguin takes five babies penguins into the water, she must come out with five baby penguins. But they don’t have to be the same ones she went in with.

Now, I may be butchering my understanding of the chick-rearing behaviors of penguins (I’d learned all that on a nature show, I think). But I’m fairly certain I’ve got the spirit of Willis’ remarks right. My point is that radicals believe in all sorts of crazy guano, not just crazy stuff about gays. And, they are rarely fully successful and even more rarely completely satisfied. The assumption I think many of the opponents of gay marriage are making is that if the radicals are successful on A, they will also be successful on B, C, D, E, and all the way through Z. But each success breeds a response and changes the dynamics of the debate. We saw this with feminism and loads of other isms. The radical feminists wanted the moon and their opponents believed if the feminists succeeded at any stage of their campaign they would succeed at all of them. But the reality was that after their first major successes — voting, for example — the appeal of their movement and their arguments withered because the context changed and the radicals lost popular support. Static analysis doesn’t work in economics and it doesn’t work in culture either.