An interesting consideration of part of what's behind the "marriage equality threatens traditional marriage" argument.
'It’s not because straight people won’t want to get married if gays are doing it, too. It’s because it redefines marriage as an institution of love instead of oppression.'
I.e., the traditional part that is threatened is less the "man and woman" aspect as much as the "man as husband, breadwinning and heading the house, and woman as wife, bearing and rearing children and getting dinner on the table every night" model. It's positing that being Ward and June Cleaver (or some darker version of same) is not the way things ought to, let alone have to, be. If we say, as a society, that marriage between two men or two women is actually marriage, then those traditional and binding and biologically "natural" roles for men and women in marriage are not inevitable, not the norm, not what we're teaching the next generation to line up to be.
Some people think that's not a good thing. Personally, I think it's a positive for couples both gay and straight, now and in the future.
The Real Reason Why Conservatives Like Ross Douthat Oppose The Gay Marriage Ruling
Of all the sour grapes conservatives chewed this past weekend over the same-sex marriage ruling, perhaps Ross Douthat’s was the sourest. While other conservatives moved on to incoherent babbling about “religious liberty”, Douthat used his New York Times column to dig his heels into the argument soundly rejected by Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges: that same-sex marriage is somehow an assault on traditional marriage.
If that's the case, traditional marriage is almost dead. All the married people I know are in two-income households.
Yes, but that particular crowd isn't terribly happy about it. And even in 2-income households, there are still often gender-specific traditional duties that are expected.
My wife won’t be quiet and do what I tell her to.
June and Ward Cleaver seemed a bit strange to me growing up. My mother worked outside of the home from the time I was an infant (decades and decades ago). My grandmother took in laundry and my mother’s whole family tended to travel to pick crops – which was work, IMO. Grandma worked scrubbing floors to help to send my mother to college so she could have a profession – and stop working as a maid which is how she came up with the rest of the money for school.
The only Mommies who were “SAHMs” that I remember from my neighborhood, were a doctor’s wife, and a sports’ agents wife. There were others, of course. I’m only speaking of the families I knew personally. Very few women didn’t at least have some kind of a part time job. My own mother-in-law was a “lunch lady” in the local school. My daughter-in-law’s mother cleaned in a convent.
It’s like these people who spout platitudes about “traditional” family life, just discount entirely, every woman who was not a member of a middle class or upper middle class family, and those women who worked in the fields, or orchards, or celery bogs (Mom really hated that) or as servants or daily “help” just didn’t count at all.
BTW, I was divorced long before SSM was legal anywhere, and I have gay friends and none of them has been able to win a toaster oven.