I feel like I'm totally missing something in the original article. Is it just supposed to be some sort of gedankenexperiment? As far as I can tell, it's suggesting one of two things. Either he wants there to be a law enforcing this TDP period before marriage, or he wants individual couples to choose to do this TDP themselves.

In the former case, the idea that a government that isn't ready to just do the simpler and more called-for choice of just adopting gay marriage isn't going to go and put this weird new law that only has negative effects in place. No government is going to pass a law with the point to educate citizens about why a different law would be better!

And in the latter case, the only couples that would choose to do some gay-marriage-empathy-education step would be those who already support gay marriage.

So, um, what am I missing?