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An evangelical and Catholic podcast, The Word of the Lord endures forever.

Welcome listeners to the editor's desk, our regular podcasts with First Things contributors.

And I have with me today Matthew Schmitz, founding editor of Compact Magazine, and

not to be discounted, a former senior editor at first things.

Welcome to the podcast, Matthew.

Thanks for having me, Rossi.

Well, I'm interested in this piece in the April, 2023 issue on gay marriage, which I think is just, was very helpful, how gay marriage changed America.

I mean, wasn't gay marriage supposed to crown the happy normalization of homosexuality? Absolutely. It's most eloquent

advocate and most influential advocate, Andrew Sullivan, presented gay marriage with some justification

as a conservative project. Obviously, you know, that formulation seems surprising to social conservatives, but Sullivan spoke out

of and to a gay culture that had a much more kind of antonomian, anarchic ethic, and he hoped

that marriage would be a way of disciplining and challenging homosexual desire into the kind of stabilizing bounds of marriage.

That's how he presented it, at least on its face. It became a little more complex, though,

when you looked more closely at what Sullivan had in mind.

It was a kind of taking gay culture out of the bohemian and into the bourgeois, as I recall from that era.

Yeah, that was part of it.

I mean, Sullivan also thought that, you know, just as marriage had something to teach gays,

...