Commonweal recently published a series of reflections by Ross DouthatJamie Manson, and Joseph Bottum on Bottum's  essay from last summer, "Things We Share."

Bottum makes a number of very good points in both essays (I find his recent essay to be even more insightful than Douthat’s). I agree with him that it is futile to try to push political policies without also re-establishing a sense of the enchantment or “God-hauntedness” of the world, and also that Catholics ought to resist falling into American post-Protestant categories. I differ with him, however, in answering the question that he poses: “Is sex the place in which that project of re-enchantment ought to begin?"

Bottum answers in the negative; I simply can’t see why, especially since so many of his own observations point toward an affirmative response. A closer examination of the arguments of same-sex marriage advocates reveals potentially fertile ground for evangelization, but we can’t possibly hope to make use of it unless we learn how to listen.

Bottum repeatedly makes reference to ways in which people with little sympathy for Catholic sexual ethics have nonetheless tried to re-integrate sex and morality. Not only does he note the expansion of the moral category of rape as a way in which people are struggling to develop a moral vocabulary regarding sex, but he refers to same-sex marriage advocates as attempting to "[build] a small but stable chapel in the rubble" of "the cathedral of meaningful marriage." It is unclear why Bottum thinks that the project of re-enchantment cannot involve sex when sex is precisely the thing that our contemporaries are most eager to see as enchanted.

Certainly Manson and the redefinition crowd don't regard sex as just another form of pleasure: They want to regard same-sex relationships as morally good. Even the tolerance of what would once have been called sexual deviance does not stem except indirectly from a view of sex as "amoral bouncing." Sex has in fact been so drained of its mystery through pornography and our culture's general sex saturation that some seem to believe anything that can make sex mysterious or exciting again ought to be acceptable. They have, in short, already rejected the idea that sex is "amoral bouncing." No one wants disenchanted sex.

Yet the most culturally salient arguments for same-sex marriage aren't actually about sexthey're about relationships. When you read statements from people like Republican senator Rob Portman about why they have evolved on this issue, you never hear them repeat the line about "two consenting adults in the privacy of their home"it's always about being able to make "long-term commitments to each other and build families, so as to foster strong, stable communities and promote personal responsibility." Insofar as the push for same-sex marriage involves a greater emphasis on the primacy of relationships between individuals over the relationship between the individual and the state, conservatives ought to embrace and affirm that central impulse. Furthermore, we should readily recognize that when advocates campaign for the right to visit loved ones in the hospital, they have accepted, however unintentionally and implicitly, the words of St. John Paul II: "Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought."

If we are looking for an area of life that our society wants to see as enchanted, we need look no further than the same-sex marriage debate. To retreat from this conversation now would be akin to Paul seeing the Athenians' altar to the unknown god and concluding that the Athenians were hopelessly superstitious and polytheistic. Yet if Paul had begun his speech in the agora after years of unreflectively hypocritical condemnation (others have already written persuasively as to why this is our current situation) of the Athenians, we could hardly expect the Athenians to listen readily.

If we want society to be ready to listen to our message, we must first show that we have been listening to them diligently, patiently, and charitably, focusing not on easy sound bytes and witty retorts, but on the joys, hopes, griefs, and anxieties that the Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et Spes 1) tells us should not fail to raise an echo in our hearts. We must not only “take same-sex marriage advocates at their word,” as Bottum suggests. We must readilyeven eagerlyaffirm all that is good in their perspective, and there is, as I hope I have demonstrated, much good to be found.

If we can credibly affirm all the goods of companionship while affirming that there is still more to this thing we call marriage, we just might be able to hold someone’s attention long enough to advance a complete argument. Events like this week’s March for Marriage can be useful ways to remind the culture that we have something to say, but we must first demonstrate a willingness to listen as well as a patient understanding for all the legitimate reasons others might be disinclined to listen to us.