The front-page article by Clifford Krauss on Canadian gay marriage in last Sunday’s New York Times confirmed what I’ve been saying for some time. Because many gays reject monogamy, they are deeply ambivalent about marriage. Some of these gays will avoid marriage altogether. Others are clearly considering entering marriage–but with a different view of what marriage should mean. As the editor of Fab put it, “I’d be for marriage if I thought gay people would challenge the institution and not buy into the traditional meaning of ’til death do us part’ and monogamy for ever.” There are major lessons for America here. So far, only a very small percentage of the 6,685 gay couples registered as permanent partners in Toronto have married. While that number will no doubt increase with time, it seems clear that a great many gay couples will remain as registered partners. That’s because Canada has eliminated many of the differences between marriage and cohabitation. Registered gay partners who do not identify commitment with monogamy can therefore obtain many of the benefits of marriage, without actually marrying. In America, without national health insurance, and with few legal or financial benefits associated with cohabitation, many more gay couples than in Canada are likely to marry, for the sake of the benefits. So an anti-monogamy couple that would remain in a registered partnership in Canada will marry in America.. Maybe the most interesting thing about this article is the fact that it has been published at all. What’s enabled the Times to cover this issue more honestly is the re-emergence of the gay community’s internal debate over marriage. That debate was put on hold in the mid-nineties when all agreed that they favored the social endorsement that gay marriage would represent, even if many opposed the institution of marriage itself. What the Canada case shows is that, once gay marriage actually becomes legal, those gays who oppose marriage, or want to change it from within, will reemerge as a force to be reckoned with.