On the way out?

In November California will vote on marriage. Based on the comments to this column, the consensus seems to be that marriage is some sort of secular sacrament, a state recognition of our romantic committments. Nobody seems to realize that, on this basis, it becomes a perfectly useless institution, and what people are really pushing for is its abolition. On the other hand, this reduced notion of marriage has not come about with the gay movement, but the other way around. The idea of gay marriage has been made possible by a dominant mentality that was shaped many decades ago and enshrined in the no-fault divorce laws of the 1970's.