To read the essays in "Beyond Queer", wrote Joseph Bottum in the "Weekly Standard", "is to experience, again and again, this sense of language broken loose, words unmoored from meaning". Bottum argued that the book's contributors fail "to understand the internal logic of the forms of life to which they demand admittance"; they "want... the tradition without the discipline, the gravity of dogmatic religion and conventional marriage without the duties and surrenders that create gravity. They want, in other words, a reformation of language to purchase for them the fruits that require a reformation of life." Bottum later reversed his views entirely, writing an article, "The Things We Share: A Catholic's Case for Same-Sex Marriage", in which he admitted that "there's been damage done in the course of this whole debate, some of it by me".