Death Of Eros Continues Apace

No Left Turns , in highlighting Maggie Gallagher's review of David Blankenhorn's new book on marriage, takes up the theme Gallagher's been on about for close to two decades: if marriage can be anything, the romance goes right out of it. Citing Gallagher, Julie Ponzi writes:

A taste: In a court brief recently, 30 professors of history and family law told judges that marriages are "committed, interdependent partnerships between consenting adults." What’s missing from our understanding of marriage these days, she points out rather incredulously, is love and eros. By stretching the limits of marriage to include every conceivable union between two consenting adults, don’t we make it rather milquetoast and unappealing? Exactly.
While I don’t doubt that there are sincere and good people who advocate for the "right" of homosexuals to marry each other because they wish to fulfill some romantic longings, it would be foolish to ignore how unromantic marriage becomes when it is no longer an institution that ties eros to a social purpose. The social purpose is now the protection of a "right" and the eros (if it even exists) is incidental and no longer essential to that purpose. From the expectant longing of a Jane Austen novel we now descend into the mind-numbing morass of a legal brief.

Which just ain't sexy. And yet I know where you can find an eloquent defense of eros.