Gay Marriage a "Radical" Experiment?

I like Conor Friedersdorf's response to Dennis Prager's claim that "nothing as radical as redefining marriage to include members of the same sex has ever been publicly supported by a president of the United States" and that gay marriage is "the most radical social experiment in modern history." Friedersdorf reminds Prager and others who would make similar claims that "same sex marriage would permit gays to participate in an existing institution that encourages those who enter it to practice sexual fidelity, give emotional support, and provide financial stability."

Encouraging gay people to marry seems like an argument for traditional values to me, and giving gay couples rights is just plain fairness. Maurice Sendak, famous author of some of the best-loved children's books, recently died at the age of 83. For 50 years, he and his partner, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn, lived together. When Glynn was dying of lung cancer, Sendak made all the arrangements to provide his partner with around-the-clock medical care in their home. But how many gay couples have the financial resources for such care? Instead, their loved ones are checked into hospitals or hospice care, where in many states the healthy gay partner can be refused admittance to the loved one's bedside by family members inimical to the relationship, no matter how long or how committed that relationship has been.

Conor Friedersdorf lists the many radical experiments that have been initiated in this country, a list that includes women's suffrage, the birth control pill, the GI bill, in vitro fertilization, the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights movement. How about public education?

So folks should just temper their hyperbolic language and dampen their fear of change. Gay marriage would not end civilization as we know it. No.....that would be climate change.

Update
Dahlia Lithwick writes  thoughtfully in Slate today about President's "evolving" thinking on gay marriage: "It's  About the Empathy, Stupid."

Here is the conclusion of his essay:

I read [President Obama's words on gay marriage] as a very literal reminder of what needs to happen more often during this election campaign: We need to listen to the experiences of others before dismissing them as dangerous, immoral, and wrong. Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope, that his whole moral code was conditioned on the idea that to be able to empathize with people richer and poorer, more liberal and more conservative, is to be "forced beyond our limited vision.” Andrew Sullivan has called what Obama did yesterday “letting go of fear.” You can’t do that unless you listen to fear first, and that’s as good a descriptor as any for what the president did this week.