Shortly after posting my piece, Will Gay Marriage Help Tame Men’s “Piggishness”?, I considered contacting the leading national gay organizations, California groups and other individuals at the forefront of the gay marriage debate to ask them how they felt Eric Erbelding’s comments in the New York Times might impact the movement for gay marriage, particularly the campaign to defeat the proposition on the Golden State ballot this fall.

Instead, I decided to check the websites of the various organizations and bloggers to see if in favoring extending the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples, they recognized that marriage is based on the premise of monogamy. I also wonder if they sought to promote that notion in public statements on marriage.

To that end, I did a number of searches on the websites of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and Freedom to Marry, Equality California (EQ CA), the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center and Andrew Sullivan’s blog. (I could not find a search feature on Log Cabin’s website nor on those of the pro-gay marriage Equality for All and LetCaliforniaRing sites.)

I did word searches (without quotation marks) for the following: “marriage monogamy,” “marriage monogamous,” “marriage fidelity” and “marriage adultery.” Researching this post took a lot longer than I had anticipated.

And while I found more references than I had anticipated when I did the “marriage monogamous” search, most other searches came up short. On the site of Freedom to Marry, the one national group devoted primarily to promoting gay marriage, my searches yielded almost nothing, with no hits on marriage monogamy and only six for marriage monogamous.

None of those six hits indicated the ostensibly pro-marriage group supported monogamous gay unions. The closest they got was a footnote in the linked report, Black Same-Sex Households in the United States, observing that “Many gay, bisexual and straight people are monogamous.“

Most of the references I found were to other faiths’ definition of marriage and the experiences of individual couples. Nowhere did I find an organization’s representative or blogger saying that he or she believed monogamy to be an essential feature of marriage.

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So says Austin Bay. (Via Instapundit)

Funny that the White House Press Secretary who helped facilitate an Administration’s decline in the polls writes a book while the one who helped save his boss from having a public relations disaster sink him doesn’t.

Scott McClellan, considered one of the least effective press secretaries in the history of presidential public relations gains his fifteen minutes of fame and media accolades (now all but over) by writing a book trashing his colleagues. Mike McCurry, however, considered one of the most successful such press secretaries, never wrote a book about his White House experiences.

I would love to learn about the challenges McCurry faced as he helped Bill Clinton save face.

Just an interesting irony of life that of two men who plied the same trade, the one who was less successful wrote the book. Almost as if Rommel wrote the book on military strategy in World War II while Patton, Montgomery, Eisenhower and Patton all remained silent.

And all this reminds me of another McClellan. It’s as if General George McClellan wrote a book on the Union’s military strategy in the Civil War while General Ulysses S. Grant did not.

UPDATE (only slightly related): Maybe I spoke too soon on McClellan’s fifteen minutes being all but over. Yahoo! (ever ressembling the MSM in its anti-Republican tilt) leads with this news item: Former aide: Bush should tell all on CIA leak. If McClellan’s new views didn’t correspond with the MSM narrative, they wouldn’t pay him much any heed.

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