Here’s a straw in the wind to tell us which way the culture is trending. In its account of the appeals court decision overturning California’s Proposition 8—which had during its brief existence affirmed as a matter of (state) constitutional law the traditional idea of marriage as a contract between a man and a woman—The New York Times quoted one Spencer Stier, aged seventeen, who was described as “the son of one of the [presumably homosexual] couples who initiated the case,” to illustrate its “emotional repercussions” in the view of the Times reporter. “As his mother looked on,” wrote Adam Nagourney, young Spencer uttered what someone at the paper considered the “Quotation of the Day” when he said that “with this ruling, in the eyes of the government, my family is finally normal.”

Now we have long known, at least since the days of Alfred Kinsey, that the idea of the “normal” confers social sanction and, indeed, social approval. “Everybody’s sin is nobody’s sin,” was Dr. Kinsey’s watchword in counting up all the different kinds of sexual behavior, hitherto considered sinful, that he found to be within the bounds of mathematical normality. Anything that was normal had, on this view, to be OK just because it wasnormal, and that remains the view of most of the media and the popular culture. But now, it seems, the social sanction conferred by normality is returning the favor. Since one supposes that Spencer Stier’s family is by no stretch of