Given this prior consensus on the ends of marriage, the advent of calls for gay marriage are clearly far more significant than simply being demands for the expansion of the category of who the legitimate contracting parties might be. Gay marriage actually demands a fundamental revision of the ends of marriage and therefore of the essence of marriage. The arguments for gay marriage rest on a view that ascribes a different end, a different telos, to marriage because it requires the rejection of the notion that marriage must be the proper context—and indeed, the necessary moral prerequisite—for
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