In her introduction to "93", Ayn Rand says:
Have you ever wondered what they felt, those first men of the Renaissance, when - emerging from the long nightmare of the Middle Ages, having seen nothing but the deformed monstrosities and gargoyles of Medieval art as the only reflection of man's soul - they took a new, free, unobstructed look at the world and rediscovered the statues of Greek gods, forgotten under piles of rubble?
Well, if you have, you know what it was like to be 21 in 1969, as I was. Everything old was passé. Everything new was either sanpaku or groovy. And I really thought I knew which was which. But now I'm 55. And there's too much new stuff, darn it. Gary Coleman and Schwarzenegger are running for governor of California. And I can't figure out if that's groovy or plain nuts. And gay "marriage" is just plain nuts. Oh, I know. I've bantered back and forth with Andrew Sullivan about this. He thinks two men are the same as a man and a woman. OK. Or, rather, what are you talking about? Sometimes I think the difference between those who think obviously that two men have the "right" to set up housekeeping with the full sanction of the state and the support of the taxpayers, with the IRS pointing a gun at working men to get them to contribute to these two freaks who think one of them is a woman or close enough so it doesn't matter. And I start to wonder. Am I nuts? Is there really after all no difference at all between men and women? Between two men who want health insurance and a man and a woman who want to join the line of descent from Adam and Caesar and Alexander and DaVinci and Buonarotti and produce descendants to enrich the history of man on earth? Is that an ignoble ambition, to contribute to the legend of humanity? Is it just the same as two men or two women who want to spend their lives having counterfeit sex and deluding themselves into thinking they're ENTITLED to other people's money?
A thousand years from now who will remember the gay marriages? But a descendant of 3003 can follow the records back, can see who gave birth to whom, who nurtured whom, whether they did a good or lousy job. How? By whether their descendants survived and prospered. And every "couple" who rejected history and the future will be rejected by them.
