Marriage is the kind of good that can be chosen and meaningfully
participated in only by people who have at least an elementary understanding of
it and who choose it with that understanding in mind.
Marriage is an all-encompassing sharing of life. It involves, like other
bonds, a union of hearts and minds — but also, and distinctively, a bodily union
made possible by the sexual-reproductive complementarity of man and woman.
Hence it is ordered to the all-encompassing goods of procreation and family
life, and it calls for all-encompassing commitment, one that is pledged to
permanence and sexual exclusivity and fidelity. Marriage unites a husband and
wife holistically, not merely in an emotional bond but also on the bodily plane
in acts of conjugal love and in the children such love brings forth — for the
whole of life. Marriage is a form of relationship — indeed, the form of
relationship — in which a man and a woman unite in a bond that is naturally
ordered to, and would be fulfilled by, their conceiving and rearing children
together. And those who enter into this form of relationship — the human good
of marriage — are truly and fully participants in it even where their bond is
not blessed with the gift of children.
To be in such a relationship — a bodily as well as emotional union whose
distinctive features and norms are shaped by its orientation to, and aptness
for, procreation and the rearing of children — is intrinsically, not merely
instrumentally, valuable. So marriage, though it bears an inherent (rather than
incidental) link to procreation, is not properly understood as having its value
merely as a means to the good of conceiving and rearing children. That is why,
historically and rightly, infertility is not regarded as an impediment to
marriage. True bodily union in acts fulfilling the behavioral conditions of
procreation is possible even where the nonbehavioral conditions of procreation
happen not to obtain. Such union can provide the foundation and matrix of the
multilevel sharing of life that marriage is.
These insights into the nature of marriage as a human good require no
particular theology. They are, to be sure, consistent with Judeo-Christian
faith, yet ancient thinkers untouched by Jewish or Christian revelation —
including Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Musonius Rufus, Xenophanes, and Plutarch —
also distinguished conjugal unions from all others, as do many nonbiblical
faiths to this day. Nor did animus against particular persons or categories of
persons produce this conclusion, which arose in various cultures long before the
modern concept of "sexual orientation."
Nevertheless, today many are demanding the redefinition of marriage as
something other than a conjugal partnership. Indeed, several jurisdictions in
the West, including a number of European nations and several American states,
have redefined marriage to eliminate the norm of sexual complementarity. In
truth, what they have done is abolish marriage as a legal category and replace
it with something quite different — legally recognized sexual-romantic
companionship or domestic partnership — to which the label marriage has
been reassigned. So, strictly speaking, we are talking not so much about a
redefinition as an abolition of marriage.
When marriage is understood as a conjugal relationship —
that is, as a comprehensive (emotional and bodily) union oriented toward
procreation and the providing of children with both a mother and a father — it
is easy to make sense of its core features as historically understood in Western
and other cultures. But eliminating the norm of sexual complementarity removes
any ground of principle for these features. After all, if two men or two women
can marry, then what sets marriage apart from other bonds must be emotional
intensity or priority. But nothing about emotional union or intensity requires
it to be permanent, as opposed to deliberately temporary. Nothing beyond mere
sentiment or subjective preference would require it to be sexually "closed" as
opposed to "open," or limited to relationships of two persons, as opposed to
three or more in "polyamorous" sexual ensembles. There would be no ground for
understanding marriage as a sexual partnership, as opposed to one integrated
around any of a range of possible nonsexual shared interests or commitments (for
example, playing tennis, reading novels, supporting a certain sports team). Nor
would there be any basis for understanding marriage as a relationship that is
inherently enriched by family life and shaped by its demands. Yet these have
always been defining features and norms of marriage — features and norms that
make marriage unlike other forms or companionship or friendship (and unlike in
kind, not just in degree of emotional intensity).
These considerations buttress my point that what is at stake in contemporary
debates about the definition and meaning of marriage is not whether to "expand"
marriage to enlarge the pool of people "eligible" to participate in it. What is
at stake is whether to retain and support marriage in our law and culture or to
jettison it in favor of a different way of organizing human relationships.
Marriage law shapes our actions by promoting a vision of what marriage is
and, therefore, what its norms and requirements are. In almost all Western
jurisdictions, marriage has been deeply wounded by a culture of divorce, the
widespread practice of nonmarital sexual cohabitation, the normalization of
nonmarital childbearing, and other practices. None of these had to do with
same-sex partnerships or homosexual conduct, nor were or are people who are
attracted to persons of the same sex responsible for them. It was the impact of
these practices on the public understanding of marriage that weakened people's
grasp of marriage as a conjugal union and made the otherwise inconceivable idea
of same-sex "marriages" conceivable. Still, abolishing marriage as a legal
category and reassigning the label marriage to sexual-romantic domestic
partnerships would complete the rout, making it all but impossible to carry out
the reforms needed to restore the conjugal understanding of marriage and with it
a vibrant and healthy marriage culture. The more we equate marriage with what
amounts to a form of sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership, the
more difficult it will be for people to live by the stabilizing norms specific
to true marriage. This is the lesson of the past forty-five years. Unless we
restore a sound understanding of marriage and rebuild the marriage culture, the
erosion of marriage ideals will continue to harm everyone — children, spouses,
societies as a whole — but especially the poorest and most vulnerable. By
rewriting the parenting ideal, abolishing conjugal marriage as the legal norm
would undermine in our mores and practice the special value of biological
mothers and fathers. Moreover, by marking support for the conjugal view as
"bigotry," it would, as we are already seeing in Europe, the United States, and
elsewhere, damage religious liberty and freedom of speech and association.
It is important to bear in mind that under any marriage policy some
bonds, some types of intimate relationship, will remain unrecognized, and thus
some people will remain legally unmarried (however much they would like their
relationships to count as marriages under law). So we need to be able (and
ought) to meet people's concrete needs apart from civil marriage. Moreover, if
we reject equating marriage with companionship — and marriage licenses with
generic approval — we will see that conjugal marriage laws deprive no one of
companionship or its joys and mark no one as less worthy of fulfillment. True
compassion means extending authentic community to everyone, especially the
marginalized, while using marriage law for the social goal it serves best — the
goal that justifies regulating such intimate bonds in the first place: to ensure
that children know the committed love of the mother and father whose union
brought them into being.
Just as compassion for same-sex-attracted people does not require redefining
marriage, neither does preserving the conjugal view mean making them scapegoats
for its erosion. It certainly isn't about legalizing (or criminalizing)
anything. In all fifty of the United States, two men or women can have a
wedding (if they happen to believe in same-sex marriage) and share a domestic
life. Their employers and religious communities are legally free to recognize
their unions. At issue here is whether governments will effectively coerce many
other actors in the public square to do the same. And also at issue is whether
government will expand. Robust support for marital norms serves children,
spouses, and hence our whole economy, especially the poor. Family breakdown
thrusts the state into roles for which it is ill-suited: parent and discipliner
to the orphaned and neglected, and arbiter of disputes over custody and
paternity.
Redefining Means Undermining
Advocates of redefining "marriage" as sexual-romantic companionship or
domestic partnership to accommodate same-sex relationships are increasingly
confirming the point that this shift erodes the basis for permanence and
exclusivity in any relationship.
University of Calgary philosophy professor Elizabeth Brake, for example,
supports what she calls "minimal marriage," in which "individuals can have legal
marital relationships with more than one person, reciprocally or asymmetrically,
themselves determining the sex and number of parties, the type of relationship
involved, and which rights and responsibilities to exchange with each."
Judith Stacey, a prominent New York University professor who is in no way
regarded as a fringe figure, testified before Congress against the Defense of
Marriage Act. During her testimony, she expressed hope that the redefinition of
marriage would give marriage "varied, creative, and adaptive contours...[leading
some to] question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek...small
group marriages."
In their statement "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage," more than three hundred "LGBT
and allied" scholars and advocates called for legally recognizing sexual
relationships involving more than two partners. Such relationships are by no
means unheard of: Newsweek reported in 2009 that there were more than
five hundred thousand in the United States alone. In Brazil, a public notary
has recognized a trio of people as a civil union. Mexico City has considered
expressly temporary marriage licenses. The Toronto District School Board has
taken to promoting polyamorous relationships among its students.
What about the connection to family life? Writer E. J. Graff celebrates
the fact that recognizing same-sex unions would change the "institution's
message" so that it would "ever after stand for sexual choice, for cutting the
link between sex and diapers." Enacting same-sex marriage "does more than just
fit; it announces that marriage has changed shape."
What about sexual exclusivity? Andrew Sullivan, a self-styled proponent of
the conservative case for same-sex marriage, has now gone so far as to extol the
"spirituality" of "anonymous sex." He welcomes the fact that the "openness" of
same-sex unions might erode sexual exclusivity among those in opposite-sex
marriages.
Similarly, in a New York Times Magazine profile, same-sex-marriage
activist Dan Savage encourages spouses to adopt "a more flexible attitude" about
sex outside their marriage. A piece in The Advocate, a gay-interest
newsmagazine, supports my point still more candidly: "Antiequality right-wingers
have long insisted that allowing gays to marry will destroy the sanctity of
'traditional marriage,' and, of course, the logical, liberal party-line response
has long been 'No, it won't.' But what if — for once — the sanctimonious crazies
are right? Could the gay male tradition of open relationships actually alter
marriage as we know it? And would that be such a bad thing?"
Other advocates of redefining marriage have explicitly proclaimed the goal of
weakening the institution. Former president George W. Bush "is correct,"
writes journalist Victoria Brownworth, "when he states that allowing same-sex
couples to marry will weaken the institution of marriage....It most certainly
will do so, and that will make marriage a far better concept than it previously
has been." Michelangelo Signorile, another prominent advocate of redefining
marriage, urges people in same-sex relationships to "demand the right to marry
not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes but rather to debunk a myth
and radically alter an archaic institution." He says they should "fight for
same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the
institution of marriage completely, because the most subversive action lesbians
and gay men can undertake...is to transform the notion of 'family'
entirely."
Those wishing to overturn the traditional understanding of marriage as a
male-female partnership increasingly agree that redefining marriage would
undermine its stabilizing norms.
A Culture of Marriage
A standard revisionist response to the defense of conjugal marriage like the
one I am here proposing is the claim that, even if the traditional position is,
from the moral viewpoint, true, it is nevertheless unfair for the law to embody
it. For example, my friend and colleague Professor Stephen Macedo argues that
if disagreements about the nature of marriage "lie in...difficult philosophical
quarrels, about which reasonable people have long disagreed, then our
differences lie in precisely the territory that John Rawls rightly marks off as
inappropriate to the fashioning of our basic rights and liberties." So Macedo
and others claim that law and policy must be neutral with regard to competing
understandings of marriage and sexual morality.
This claim is deeply unsound. The true meaning, value, and significance of
marriage are fairly easily grasped (even if people sometimes have difficulty
living up to its moral demands) in a culture — including, critically, a legal
culture — that promotes and supports a sound understanding of marriage.
Furthermore, ideologies and practices that are hostile to a sound understanding
and practice of marriage in a culture tend to undermine the institution of
marriage in that culture. Hence it is extremely important that governments
eschew attempts to be neutral with regard to marriage and embody in their laws
and policy the soundest, most nearly correct, understanding.
The law is a teacher. Either it will teach that marriage is a reality in
which people can choose to participate but whose contours people cannot make and
remake at will, or it will teach that marriage is a mere convention that is
malleable in such a way that individuals, couples, or, indeed, groups can choose
to make of it whatever suits their desires, goals, and so on. The result, given
the biases of human sexual psychology, will be the development of practices and
ideologies that truly tend to undermine the sound understanding and practice of
marriage, together with the development of pathologies that tend to reinforce
the very practices and ideologies that cause them.
The Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, a liberal who does not share my views
regarding sexual morality, is rightly critical of forms of liberalism, including
Rawlsianism, that suppose law and government can and should be neutral among
competing conceptions of moral goodness. He has noted, for example, that
"monogamy, assuming that it is the only valuable form of marriage, cannot be
practiced by an individual. It requires a culture which recognizes it, and
which supports it through the public's attitude and through its formal
institutions." Of course, Raz does not suppose that, in a culture whose law and
public policy do not support monogamy, a man who happens to believe in it
somehow will be unable to restrict himself to having one wife or will be
required to take additional wives. His point, rather, is that, even if monogamy
is a key element in a sound understanding of marriage, large numbers of people
will fail to understand that or why that is the case — and therefore will fail
to grasp the value of monogamy and the point of practicing it — unless they are
assisted by a culture that supports, formally by law and policy, as well as by
informal means, monogamous marriage. What is true of monogamy is equally true
of the other elements of a sound understanding of marriage.
In short, marriage is the kind of good that can be chosen and meaningfully
participated in only by people who have at least an elementary understanding of
it and who choose it with that understanding in mind. Yet people's ability to
understand it, at least implicitly, and thus to choose it, depends crucially on
institutions and cultural understandings that both transcend individual choice
and are constituted by a vast number of individual choices.
