Interesting NY Times Article on Gay Marriage

I thought this was an interesting article in today's NY Times about a push to pass a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.  Apparently, a number of Catholic cardinals have signed on to the effort.  (According to the Times, Robert George has been leading the charge on this recent push as well.)  I don't think we need to rehash our prior discussions of the Church's position on homosexuality and gay marriage (or, for that matter, the continuing silence from the Catholic right on torture). 

But I would like to make one observation.  As Jean Porter pointed out in her talk at Fordham's Natural Law Colloquium a couple of months ago, it's just hard to understand why anyone views gay marriage as the main (or even a major) threat to the traditional family.  If the point is to protect the family, why not, for example, a constitutional amendment banning no-fault divorce?  (To be clear, I'm not endorsing such an amendment, but no-fault divorce strikes me as a far greater threat to the traditional family than gay unions.)  As Stephen Macedo has noted, focusing on gay unions in the face of far more obvious threats that are perpetrated by heterosexuals comes across as blaming a traditionally marginalized minority for the effects of sins that are committed on a daily basis by the in-group, including some of those very people calling for a constitutional prohibition of gay marriage.

(In fact, why not go back to some of the themes of CST and talk about economic inequality and the virtual necessity of the two-income family as threats to the traditional family?  It's no accident that in the time that two income families have become the norm, middle class income has stagnated and the income of the wealthiest one percent has rocketed.  Income inequality is now at levels we have not seen since the Gilded Age, a change that has occurred almost entirely since 1980.  So it seems to me that the Reagan/Bush II economic policies are more plausibly a threat to the traditional family than gay marriage.)

Again, I don't want to get into it over Church teaching on homosexuality or even gay unions.  My point is that (even assuming those teachings to be cogent), given limited resources, it seems incredible to suggest that the actions of this very small community consitutes the most serious threat to the family, one worthy of all the attention it's getting.  And I don't think it's a satisfying response to talk about the expressive value of law, etc. when the power of that expressive value in this case is largely a consequence of (or at least greatly magnified by) the nearly obsessive acitvism oriented towards gay marriage by its opponents.