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July 16 - November 29, 2018
And it has shut down debate just as we were starting to hear new voices—gay people who agree that children need their mother and their father, and children of same-sex couples who wish they knew both their mom and dad.
I argue here that we are sleepwalking into an unprecedented cultural and social revolution. A truth acknowledged for millennia has been overruled by five unelected judges. The consequences will extend far beyond those couples newly able to obtain a marriage license.
How can the law teach that fathers are essential, for instance, when it has officially made them optional?
Indeed, a serious attempt is well under way to define opposition to same-sex marriage as nothing more than irrational bigotry. If that attempt succeeds, it will pose the most serious threat to the rights of conscience and religious freedom in American history.
He doesn’t specify where the “conversation” ends and coercion begins, but he approvingly quotes a gay rights activist and philanthropist who says that “church leaders must be made ‘to take homosexuality off the sin list.’”
But as I explain in this book, great thinkers throughout human history—and from every political community until about the year 2000—thought it reasonable and right to view marriage as the union of husband and wife.
Indeed, this view of marriage has been nearly a human universal. It has been shared by the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions; by ancient Greek and Roman thinkers untouched by the influence of these religions; and by Enlightenment philosophers. It is affirmed by canon law as well as common and civil law.
Bans on interracial marriage, by contrast, were part of an insidious system of racial subordination and exploitation that denied the equality and dignity of all human beings and forcibly segregated citizens based on race. When these interracial marriage bans first arose in the American colonies, they were inconsistent not only with the comm...
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As for the Bible, while it doesn’t present marriage as having anything to do with race, it insists that marriage has everything to do with sexual complementarity. From the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation, the Bible is replete with spousal imagery and the language of husband and wife. One activist Supreme Court ruling cannot overthrow th...
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The key question, again, is whether the liberal elites who now have the upper hand will treat their dissenting fellow citizens as they treat racists or as they treat pro-lifers.
We must call the court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges what it is: judicial activism.
We must protect our freedom to speak and live according to the truth.
We must redouble our efforts to make the case in the public square.
No, I’ll be making arguments based on reason about what marriage is, why marriage matters for public policy, and what the
consequences are of redefining marriage. I will make reasoned arguments about why religious liberty is a human right, how public policy can best protect it, and why analogies to racism fail. I will suggest pastoral strategies for religious communities to better advance these truths as well.
It is not bigotry but compassion and common sense to insist on laws and public policies that maximize the likelihood that children will grow up with a mom and a dad.
The debate in the United States in the decade and a half before Obergefell v. Hodges wasn’t about equality. It was about marriage. We disagreed about what marriage is.
Equality before the law protects citizens from arbitrary distinctions, from laws that treat them differently for no good reason. To know whether a law makes the right distinctions—whether the lines it draws are justified—one has to know the public purpose of the law and the nature of the good it advances or protects.
But as Justice Samuel Alito pointed out two years earlier in his dissenting opinion in the federal Defense of Marriage Act case, the U.S. Constitution is silent about what marriage is. Justice Alito framed the debate as a contest between two visions of marriage—what he calls the “conjugal” and “consent-based” views.
Rather than understanding marriage correctly as different in kind from other relationships, the consent-based view sees in it only a difference of degree: marriage has what all other relationships have, but more of it. This, we argue, gets marriage wrong. It cannot explain or justify any of the distinctive commitments that marriage requires—monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence—nor can it explain what interest the government has in it.
If marriage is simply about consenting adult romance and caregiving, why should it be permanent?
The consent-based view of what marriage is simply fails as a theory of marriage because it can’t explain any of the historical marital norms.
If marriage is just about the love lives of consenting adults, let’s get the state out of their bedrooms.
There is nothing “homosexual” or “gay” or “lesbian,” of course, about the consent-based view of marriage. Many heterosexuals have bought into it over the past fifty years. This is the vision of marriage that came out of the sexual revolution.
Long before there was a debate about same-sex anything, far too many heterosexuals bought into a liberal ideology about sexuality that makes a mess of marriage: cohabitation, no-fault divorce, extramarital sex, nonmarital childbearing, pornography, and the hook-up culture all contributed to the breakdown of the marriage culture. The push for the legal redefinition of marriage didn’t cause any of these problems. It is, rather, their logical conclusion. The problem is that it’s the logical conclusion of a bad train of logic.
The law cannot be neutral between the consent-based and conjugal views of marriage. It will enshrine one view or the other. It will either teach that marriage is about consenting adult love of whatever size or shape the adults choose, or it will teach that marriage is a comprehensive union of sexually complementary spouses who live by the norms of monogamy, exclusivity, and permanency, so that children can be raised by their mom and dad. There is no third option. There is no neutral position. The law will embrace one or the other.
that marriage is a permanent, exclusive union of husband and wife. Much of human wisdom is tacit knowledge.
Explaining why marriage is the union of a man and a woman is like explaining why wheels are round, but it has to be done.
Marriage unites spouses in a comprehensive act: marital sexual intercourse is a union of hearts, minds, and bodies. Marriage (like the marital act that seals it) is inherently ordered toward a comprehensive good, the creation and rearing of entirely new human organisms, who are to be raised to participate in every kind of human good. And finally, marriage demands comprehensive norms: spouses make the comprehensive commitments of permanency and exclusivity
throughout time (permanent) and at every moment in time (exclusive).
First, the comprehensive act. How can two persons unite comprehensively? To unite comprehensively, they must unite at all levels of their personhood. But what is a person? Human beings are mind-body unities. We are not ghosts in machines or souls that are somehow inhabiting flesh and bones. Rather, we are enfleshed souls or ensouled bodies—a mind-body unity. Thus, to unite with someone in a comprehensive way, one must unite with him at all levels of his personhood: a union of hearts, minds, and bodies.
Yet with respect to one biological function, you are radically incomplete. It takes two to tango, and it takes two to make a baby. In the marital act, a man’s body and a woman’s body don’t just make contact as in a kiss or interlock as when holding hands. The Hebrew Bible reveals something true about our humanity when it says that a man and a woman in the marital act become “one flesh.” This isn’t merely a figure of speech. The Bible doesn’t say the husband and wife are so much in love it’s as if the two become one. No, the Scriptures rightly suggest that at the physical and metaphysical
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and a woman truly become two in one flesh. The sexual complementarity of a man and a woman allows them to unite in this comprehensive way.
The lovemaking act is also the life-giving act. The act that unites a man and a woman as husband and wife is the same act that can make them mother and father. This begins to tell us something about what the marital relationship is ordered toward.
In the same way that academic communities engage in academic actions that are ordered toward the academic goods of the pursuit of truth and knowledge, the marital relationship is (like the act that embodies it) ordered toward the marital good of procreation and rearing and education of children. The good toward which the marital act is ordered is not a one-time good like winning the next football game or passing the next test. The marital act is comprehensive—it unites the spouses in heart, mind, and body—and is thus oriented toward a comprehensive good—the procreation and education of new
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What sort of exclusivity does marriage call for? Sexual exclusivity.
It is the sexual act that transforms an ordinary friendship, a union of hearts and minds, into the comprehensive community of marriage, and so the marital norm of exclusivity focuses on sexual fidelity.
requires that you pledge not to unite sexually with others. It requires you, in the words of the traditional marriage vow, to forsake all others.
To unite comprehensively, spouses can’t hold anything back. If they have a sunset clause, if they have an escape date, if they have a way out, then they’re not really uniting comprehensively.
The families that marriage produces—not only parents and children but also grandparents, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles and cousins—will be stable only if the marital union itself is stable.
Indeed, cultures that had no concept of “sexual orientation” and cultures that took homoeroticism for granted have understood that the union of husband and wife is a distinct and uniquely important relationship.
How do you account for the fact that, as far as I’m aware, until the end of the twentieth century, there never was a nation or a culture that recognized marriage between two people of the same sex? Now, can we infer from that that those nations and those cultures all thought that there was some rational, practical purpose for defining marriage in that way, or is it your argument that they were all operating independently based solely on irrational stereotypes and prejudice?
“there have been cultures that did not frown on homosexuality. . . . Ancient Greece is an example. It was well accepted within certain bounds.” The justice added that “people like Plato wrote in favor of that.” And yet, the ancient Greeks, including Plato, never thought a same-sex relationship was a marriage.
This universal definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman is no historical coincidence. Marriage did not come about as a result of a political movement, discovery, disease, war, religious doctrine, or any other moving force of world history—and certainly not as a result of a prehistoric decision to exclude gays and lesbians. It arose in the nature of things to meet a vital need: ensuring that children are conceived by a mother and father committed to raising them in the stable conditions of a lifelong relationship.
Virtually every political community has regulated male-female sexual relationships. This is not because government is a sucker for romance. If marriage were just about consenting adult love, the state wouldn’t be in the marriage business. Government recognizes male-female sexual relationships because these alone produce new human beings. For highly dependent infants, there is no path to physical, moral, and cultural maturity—no path to personal responsibility—without a long and delicate process of ongoing care and supervision to which mothers and fathers bring unique gifts. Unless children
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of society. Marriage exists to make men and women responsible to each other and to any children that they might have. Let me explain.
Marriage is based on the anthropological truth that men and women are complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children deserve a mother and a father.
“Marriage is a socially arranged solution for the problem of getting people to stay together and care for children that the mere desire for children, and the sex that makes children possible, does not solve.”
Connecting sex, babies, and moms and dads is the irreplaceable social function of marriage. Laws and social expectations can strengthen or weaken marriage in this role, and that’s why the government is rightly involved in this aspect of our lives.
Society as a whole, not merely any given set of spouses, benefits from marriage. This is because marriage helps to channel procreative love into a stable institution that provides for the orderly bearing and rearing of the next generation.
