While re-reading this chapter for the blog, I had a lot of flashbacks to the period after 2008 when California (my home state) first legalized same-sex marriage, then took it away under a ballot proposition, then ruled against the results of the proposition in the state supreme court, then waited for the parallel US Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage throughout the USA. The fight isn't over--we are seeing how easy it is for rights to be eroded, roadblocked, or de facto reversed under a hostile regime. Through all that period, there was the constant wave of frustration at how the "one man + one woman" crowd were unable to come up with a coherent logical argument for their model as the sole valid one. I read through the arguments before the California Supreme Court in detail and they rehearse a lot of points similar to what Boswell explores in this chapter -- the long duration of constantly shifting concepts that is "marriage" which has never aligned with the supposed ideal that marriage-conservatives claim to support.
I have a novel outline (one of my few near-contemporary ideas) in which one subplot involves that process in California and the emotional whiplash that potential access to same-sex marriage created. I still remember vividly the day the CA Supreme Court decision was announced (before Prop 8 snatched it away again, temporarily) and that overwhelming euphoria of, "If I had a girlfriend and we wanted to spend our lives together, today we could get married. Just like anyone else." And however I may nitpick aspects of Boswell's gender-blindness in Same-Sex Unions, I'm pretty certain that this book was a major contributor to the process tha made that moment possible.
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