David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rausch came to the game marriage debate from the predictable opposing sides.

But both as long time advocates of the institution of marriage.

Now they're pursuing a different way for all of us to grapple with the future of marriage redefined.

We experience the redemptive conversation they model as the subject of same-sex marriage is before the Supreme Court.

We called what we did achieving disagreement.

Yeah, I like that a bit.

See, because it's easy to have a false disagreement.

I can just say, you're a bad person, you're stupid.

But to actually know where we disagree requires effort from you and from me.

We have to have a relationship to do that.

And that I'll tell you in today's world of hyper polarization and the sheer idiocy that is our public debate.

You know, the heart just cries out for this kind of serious effort to achieve disagreement.

I believe there's an element of patriotism about this.

And I saw on you someone who was willing to say, you know, being right is not as important to me as making a pact with my fellow Americans on the other side so that we can share this.

We can live together.

The future of marriage.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on Being.

I interviewed Jonathan Rauch and David Blankenhorn before a live audience at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs in Minnesota in 2012.

A question on which we focus and fight is that of legalizing gay marriage.

We're going to make that question subordinate this hour to a broader reality that in 2012,

a majority of Americans across our partisan and religious divides favor some kind of legal and social recognition for gay couples.

In his 2007 book The Future of Marriage, even as David Blankenhorn argued against gay marriage as a social good, he wondered, what would it take for our collective confrontation with this issue to become redemptive rather than divisive?

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