Against Gay Marriage

               Let me begin by stealing an analogy from Princeton scholar Robert P. George’s The Clash of Orthodoxies.

“Academic legend has it that there was once an A+ student in a moral philosophy class who passionately argued  term paper was titled “There Is No Such Thing as Justice.” Without penning a single remark on the paper, the professor gave a failing grade. Stunned, the student went to see the professor. “Professor,” the student began, “I worked extremely hard on that paper. I thought it was quite good.” “Quite so,” the professor interrupted. “In fact,” he continued, “it was perhaps the best term paper I have read in thirty years of teaching this class. Your arguments were lucid. Your writing was brilliant. And your withering attack on all legal, moral and religious orthodoxies concerning justice was profound. In fact, you persuaded me that ‘There’s no such thing as justice,’ so don’t complain!”

As this student learned, fidgeting with long established truths, in many instances, can be self-defeating and dangerous. Many of the moral, legal and religious truths that societies have long held can seem difficult to defend when faced with the liberal, progressive agenda of the day. The reason they are so hard to defend in once sense speaks to their correctness. One has never before had to generate arguments for things that societies have seen as self evident—almost a priori true. Of course we should not kill children. Of course there is an intrinsic difference between males and females. Of course marriage is an institution for one male and one female. Well, as the moral fabric of society continues to decay, those things which for centuries were simply and instinctually known to be true, now require rationalization. So, let me provide a brief, non-bigoted, rationalization for the preservation of marriage as a state ordained institution that can and must be between one man and one woman.

So what is marriage? Marriage has always been, and must remain, a bodily, emotional, and spiritual union of one man and one woman, ordered towards the generating, nurturing, and  educating of children, marked by exclusivity and permanence, and consummated and actualized by acts that are reproductive in type, even if not in every case, in fact.

What is the secular definition of marriage? “Marriage is a legal convention whose goal is to support a merely emotional union—which may or may not, depending on the subjective preferences of the partners, be marked by commitments or exclusivity and permanence.”

I have no registered political partisanship. I tend to be a libertarian on most issues. I want the government involved in my life as little as possible. I feel that when most people are pressed, they share these beliefs to a certain degree. We want to be left alone to live our own lives without perpetual interference. Yet, even the most strident libertarian, the one who wants no public education, and no governmental laws prohibiting the ingestion of foreign substances, does not fight for the government to stop enforcing traffic laws. Why is this? Because, in this instance, the libertarian understands that the government can secure the “good” for the people in a better and safer way than if it were left to the individual inclinations and proclivities of each individual motorist. Imagine driving in LA or NYC or on the LIE where every driver decided for himself what the rules of driving were. To avoid mass chaos, and secure a better world for its citizens, the government overrules the individual wishes of the masses and establishes laws that are in the best interest of the citizens. They establish laws that might seem annoying and bothersome and not what we want at the particular time, but they secure safety for all.

Now ask yourself a question, would you like the government to be involved in each and every one of your friendships? When you meet someone at school, church, the park, would you want to have to get the state involved before you could officially become friends? Would you want to fill out and sign paperwork to begin your new relationship? What happens if you get in a fight and you no longer want to be friends? Would you want to pay lawyers to decide how to redistribute your belongings?

This clearly would be absurd. But for some reason the state is and has been involved in marriages in this way. That is because, much to the chagrin of the secularists, marriage is not just any relationship. It is not even just one’s deepest or most intimate relationship. The state has always gotten involved in marriage because it recognizes that marriage is the most fundamental way to secure the “good” for society. The state has regulated marriages because just like the traffic analogy, if marriage was simply an emotional bond, then chaos would ensue.

So what is it that makes marriage so important in the eyes of the state? If the state does not regulate our day to day relationships, why does it do so with marriage? The state is in the business of not only functioning and surviving for this particular moment, but also for the future. And how do we secure the future? We must have well adjusted children.

Now no sociologist worth the paper that their degree is printed on will deny the fact that children who are raised in households with both a father and a mother are far more likely to be highly functioning, productive members of society, than those who are raised without a parent (we see this particularly when no father is around to raise the child). Simply look at our prisons; they are flooded with men who were raised in fatherless homes (Dr. Paul Vitz, Professor at NYU has a fantastic book, ‘Faith of the Fatherless,’ detailing that race has little to do with crime rates—children of all races, who are raised without fathers, are equally likely to commit crimes).

Men and women clearly have different attributes that they would pass on to a child, and that child would be best suited if he or she had both influences in his or her life. But even if we succumb to postmodern gender politics and claim that there is no difference between a man and a woman (Think about how absurd such a statement is: “There is no difference between a man and a woman.” This statement is only rendered logically coherent because there is a difference. One is saying that there is no difference between X (those things) and Y (those DIFFERENT things) there is a deeply specific way that only traditional marriage secures the “good” for society.

Children are better off if their parents are together. But if marriage is purely and emotional bond, and is not predicated on exclusivity and permanence, then what we have is a society that views marriage as something that can be ended as quickly and seamlessly as a high school friendship. Marriage, on the traditional view is predicated on a love that lasts forever, because it is a love that continues through the birth of a child (see my Valentine’s Day post). The secular conception of marriage is something that streamlines the ability to end the relationship. As the state grows to accept these non-traditional marriages, the process and protocol for ending marriages will be streamlined for Gays and non-Gays alike. The repercussions of this will fall like an anvil on the coming generations of children.

I have tried to avoid anything that might be construed as “fear mongering,” but it is clear that opening the door to gay marriage is a slippery slope. If marriage is simply one’s deepest relationship what stops one from allowing polyamorus relationships? What about five frat brothers (who do not have a sexual relationship with each other) who decided that they all want the rights and privileges of marriage? What if I am a loner by nature, but I grow to have a deep, intimate and loving relationship with myself? Can I then marry myself?

This all might sound absurd, and it should, because it is absurd. Gay marriage is beyond oxymoronic. It is not a thing. It is gibberish. To allow “gay marriage” is to deny marriage as a thing.