The bells are ringing ... Marriage, marriage, everywhere.

AS same-sex couples from neighboring jurisdictions and even states besiege San Francisco's city offices clamoring to be wed, one is half-tempted to grant them what they say they want--the stability of lifelong marriage. Suppose same-sex marriages were introduced by legislation that also made divorce much harder to obtain: How many same-sex couples would then be rushing to join San Francisco's wedding carnival? My suspicion is that lesbians would heavily outnumber gay men and that there would be a great many grooms left waiting at the municipal altar. It is not lifelong commitment that the couples are seeking (except in moments of romantic fantasy), but the revolving door of modern marriage with no-fault divorce. And it tells us a great deal that legislation to make marriage both gender-free and permanent would have no chance whatsoever of passing--while gay marriage is almost upon us.

Whatever its conservative advocates may argue, gay marriage would be not a move toward greater stability in homosexual relationships, but just another domino falling in the slow-motion collapse of marriage in the Western world. Radical advocates of gay marriage support it for that very reason. As Stanley Kurtz has persuasively demonstrated, the end result of this trend is visible in Scandinavia--where marriage is gradually dying away, replaced by cohabitation, family dissolution, and child-rearing by the welfare state. Gay marriage in Scandinavia has done nothing to halt these trends. Indeed, they have accelerated in the period since gay marriages and civil unions were legalized.

Yet unless an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is passed, same-sex marriage is likely to become a reality in America. The Massachusetts supreme court has effectively ordered the legislature to allow gay couples to marry. Even before that, the Canadian supreme court's discovery of a right to same-sex marriage--though hotly contested in Ottawa--was presented in the U.S. media as an indicator of where the U.S. is heading on the grounds that, well, Canada is a more progressive version of America. And Justice Sandra Day O'Connor laid the groundwork for direct legal influence when she argued in favor of citing the decisions of overseas courts as precedents in U.S. court decisions. Judges will naturally pick and choose among these decisions, generally preferring to cite Scandinavia over Saudi Arabia, so that individual judicial decisions will become quite arbitrary while their overall drift is in a left-progressive direction. Such easygoing arbitrariness seems to be catching. In San Francisco, even the mayor is legislating--though the courts may well rebuff this challenge to their monopoly.

It is far from certain that even a federal amendment would halt this juggernaut. Although the Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass into law, the courts subsequently imposed a great many of its provisions by judicial fiat. And it is not hard to imagine determined ideological judges somehow circumventing the amendment, however cleverly it is drafted, to make gay marriage exist in all but name. That would not satisfy its advocates, of course, for whom absolute equality between gays and straights in "marriage rights" is the goal. But how long could that goal be denied once marriages and "civil partnerships" were for practical purposes identical arrangements? Judges who found ingenious ways to interpret the amendment as mandating gay marriage--don't laugh until you have studied how the 1964 Civil Rights Act came to mandate racial preferences--would have the grave nodding agreement of the New York Times and all the other arbiters of cultural and social fashion.

Is this analysis defeatist? No, because I will propose ways to outwit these trends. But it is pessimistic, because it suggests that some form of gay marriage is inevitable unless there are two great revolutions simultaneously. The first is a religious revival. As Stanley Kurtz has pointed out, both gay marriage and the decline of heterosexual marriage tend to appear where religion, especially Catholicism, becomes weak and socially timid. The second is a successful political campaign to limit judicial review severely and to restore legislative and democratic authority on political questions. (Neither revolution is likely, but a religious revival does at least have the consolation of being unpredictable.)

Conservatives should advocate three broad principles on the marriage issue. First, marriage should be hard to get out of--and if there are children under 16 in the family, it should be very hard to get out of. Second, since society recognizes that marriage is a serious mutual sharing of responsibilities for the lives of others, mainly children, marriage should be given real fiscal and social advantages over the single life and non-marital living arrangements. (Once very substantial, these advantages have atrophied in recent years under the influence of feminism, individualism, and liberal theories of fiscal non-discrimination.) Third, there should be no reforms that seem to grant social or governmental approval for non-marital sexual partnerships.

If gay marriage is to be forced on us by non-democratic bodies, we should seek to embed these counteracting principles in legislation. One of the consolations this might provide is the actual rescue of traditional marriage from descent into a cold Scandinavian hell. A few months ago, I suggested that we might end up with three competing institutions: 1) Church marriages, independent of the state, and confined to heterosexual couples, with much stricter rules for divorce than exist in civil marriages; 2) civil marriages, open now to same-sex couples; and 3) household partnerships open to any grouping of people under one roof--perhaps a widowed mother and her unmarried son, or two crusty old bachelors sharing a household for convenience, or two lesbians uncertain about the permanence of their relationship. Such partnerships could enjoy certain legal rights, tax arrangements, and rights to hospital visitation and insurance, but the state would take absolutely no interest in the sleeping arrangements of those in the household and there would be no presumption that the households were essentially sexual relationships.

In this scenario, traditional marriage would be entirely in the purview of the churches, in opposition to the radical-modernizing state--and traditional marriage could well emerge as the winner from this evolutionary competition, if only because such marriages would tend to produce more children and thus to reproduce themselves.

This modest proposal of mine aroused a fair amount of criticism. Blogger Noah Millman, my most severe critic, raised several points of interest--notably that if the churches no longer insisted that their marriages be recognized by the state, then there would be no legal means whereby spouses could hold their partners to their vows. I am not inclined to be overawed by these criticisms--the modern state does not enforce all the religious vows of spouses married in church today, merely the diminishing number of them that coincide with the regulations of the government--but I am not inclined to dismiss them either. I would therefore amend my proposal as follows. In order to persuade the churches not to cut their links with civil marriage, the state would introduce a new version of it with much stricter rules for divorce--the so-called covenant marriages created some years ago in Louisiana. Couples in covenant marriages would also enjoy much more generous fiscal benefits, as a recognition that they have taken on a more arduous task. The churches in turn would agree to solemnize only such covenant marriages. The other two institutions--current civil marriage and household partnerships--would remain as described above.

There is, however, one drawback to this scheme from a traditionalist and religious standpoint. As a form of civil marriage in a gender-free legal environment, covenant marriage would presumably have to be open to same-sex couples. That would, however, return us to the question with which we began: Just how many gay and lesbian couples would sign up for a marriage that really was lifelong? It would be a searching test of consistency. And it would also settle the question of whether gays seeking marriage are seeking public commitment or merely equality of esteem.