REVIEW OF JONATHAN RAUCH'S NEW BOOK: Christopher Caldwell

...Some people may support same-sex marriage only as a roundabout means to recognition for gays. Not Rauch. Gay himself, he seeks it because he wants to get married, and thinks everyone should. His idea of marriage is old-school, even sentimental. (''I mean two souls bonded in each other's eyes and together clasped to their community's bosom.'') Of those gays who fear that marriage will force them to trade in a libertine lifestyle for a bourgeois heterosexual one, Rauch says, ''I believe that they are largely right, and that gay integration into the mainstream would be, on balance, a good thing.''

Marriage has a ''special power'' to bind people into communities and into other families, Rauch thinks. Its two primary purposes are settling young adults into a web of commitments and providing caregivers to the old and infirm. Since homosexuals can and do carry out the responsibilities of marriage, they deserve to accede to its rights. ...

So while traditionalists complain that marriage is embattled, and while gay activists complain that marriage is unfair, Rauch insists that marriage is embattled because it's unfair. When gays can marry, they will appear in a new light -- as allies, not interlopers; relations between gays and straights will improve, because what makes homosexuals appear most ''grotesque and threatening'' is not their sexual orientation but the outlawry against convention to which the unavailability of marriage consigns them. For Rauch, the best way to defend marriage is by letting gays in, not keeping them out. ...

And yet he commits an important error of emphasis, which is not fatal to his case for gay marriage but damages his case that gay marriage can be traditional marriage. It concerns the importance of childbearing. ''I hope I won't be accused of saying that children are a trivial reason for marriage,'' he says early in the book. ''They just cannot be the only reason.'' It is true that marriage has historically served many purposes. But alongside that of providing a nonanarchic context for producing children, they all look like moons against Jupiter. Rauch hates this argument. He finds it ''incoherent, incorrect and antimarriage.'' He is happy to speak of the welfare of children, but skirts the production of children, dismissing it as a ''sex-centered view.'' ...

... Traditional society never had any reason to marry gays, even in periods of relative tolerance, because it never had any need for homosexual sex. Nor does it today. What has happened to render gay marriage suddenly more logical is society's waning need for married people's sex. Sex, childbearing and childrearing -- which marriage once bound as tightly as an atomic nucleus -- have been disaggregated. This has happened partly through law (on divorce and adoption), partly through technology (contraception, abortion and artificial insemination), partly through convention (cohabitation) and partly through knowledge (on the innateness of homosexuality, for instance).

Rauch may have too high an opinion of the sort of marital club that would have gays as members. It seems unlikely that marriage could simultaneously be flexible enough to admit homosexuals and rigid enough to offer them the same protection and rights (and discipline) it offered heterosexuals in the old days. But it seems even less likely that, as Rauch hopes, the gay-marriage movement will be able to shore up an institution that has for decades been undermined legally, socially, medically, theologically, philosophically, psychologically and politically. Gays will soon accede to marriage, but only because marriage is losing its old set of purposes and is becoming, irrevocably, something else.

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