“You need to accept Roe v. Wade. The unlimited abortion license is nothing but simple justice for women. Besides, the next generation will completely accept abortion. They will grow up knowing nothing else. They will not have all your hang-ups about sex and your squeamishness about scraping a bit of tissue out of a woman’s body. Reproductive freedom is the wave of the future. You are on the Wrong Side of History.”

A funny thing happened on the way to History: the people did not perform as promised. Last year, I took a group of Ruth Institute students up to the West Coast Walk for Life in San Francisco. Official estimates place the attendance at over 35,000. But I wasn’t counting. I was looking at the faces. I saw what anyone can see, if they care to look: the pro-life movement is a youth movement.

The average age of the walkers at the West Coast Walk for Life was probably around late twenties, and even lower if you count babies in strollers. Toward the front of the parade were the Berkeley Students for Life (yes, there is such a thing) and the Stanford pro-life club, (yes, they exist as well), their long-standing cross-Bay rivalry set aside for the day. Busloads of high school students, college students road-tripping in from all over the West Coast, whole church youth groups, families with small children, babies in arms, backpacks and strollers. The next generation is not going along quietly with the Inexorable March of History.

And why should they?

The pro-abortion forces did not correctly predict how the young would react to the Abortion Regime. Simple demographics favor a pro-life next generation: advocates of life have more children on average than their opponents. But beyond that, every person under the age of 38 is in some sense a survivor of the abortion regime. Any of them could have been killed. And some of them realize that.

Many of them have seen friends have abortions to save relationships with boyfriends, only to have the boyfriend end the relationship anyway. Some of them have learned from experience that recreational sex is not as fun as they imagined. The coarsening of sexual relationships, the pressure on women to perform sexually, the easy escape for men from responsibility for their unborn children: some of the Millennials have put two and two together and figured out that the abortion regime enables all this.

Katelyn Sills, President of Berkeley Students for Life, attended the 2011 Walk on Saturday. She reports that the pro-life initiative comes from the young people themselves, not from their parents or other authority figures. When high school students form a pro-life club, it isn’t to pad their resumes: that particular extra-curricular activity won’t impress most college admissions offices. Students form pro-life clubs because they see the injustice of abortion: they identify with the child.

It is the interests of children that the Abortion Regime set aside in order to accommodate the desires of adults. And it is the interests of children that the redefinition of marriage is in the process of setting aside as well. Remember the old pro-abortion slogan, “every child a wanted child?” Who can take that seriously today? “Kids just need two adults who love them” will come to sound every bit as hollow.

Same-sex civil marriage tacitly but surely asserts that kids don’t really need mothers and fathers, and that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. The next generation will grow up with the consequences of institutionalizing this belief throughout society. Same-sex civil marriage is turning the drift toward artificial reproductive technology for infertile married couples into a tidal wave of entitlement for anyone married or single, straight or gay, of any age, to manufacture children for any reason. Redefining marriage will come to mean that there is no particular reason to insist on two parents. Some in the next generation will have three or four parents.

Advocates of redefining marriage assure us that all will be well. Children will do fine, whatever the loving adults in their lives decide to do. IVF children will be so wanted by their legal parents that the lifetime separation from their natural parents will not trouble them. And children of unconventional family structures will have more adults to love them. Divorce, separation, complex custody quarrels, kids shuttling between four households with their sleeping bags and backpacks: that’s just anti-equality hysteria and will never happen.

As time goes on, it will become more obvious that “marriage equality” requires us, men, women and children alike, to ignore biology. Some women who have children with female partners will find that sharing the care of her child with another woman, is not the same as sharing the care of her child with the child’s father. Some men who agree to be sperm donors as “friends” will find that they want more of a relationship with their own children than they had anticipated. And some children are going to have feelings about their absent parents, uncomfortable questions about their origins, and complex emotions about being partially purchased.

Advocates of same sex marriage typically respond, “That’s just biology,” as if biology were nothing. These advocates are asking people to set aside the natural attachment of parents to their own children, the natural difficulties of treating another person’s child as if they were your own, the natural desires of children to know who they are and where they came from. And these advocates are asking the whole of society to ignore sexual differentiation in parenthood: no mothers, no fathers, just generic parents. These enemies of the human body seem to forget that there are no generic people, just men and women.

As acceptance of gender-neutral marriage spreads throughout society, some same sex couples will not be “gay:” they will be forming same sex unions of convenience. And even among the gays and lesbians who marry, not all of them will be the most committed ideologues. Some will just want to live the ordinary lives that advocates of same sex marriage have been promising them. But biology will assert itself.

Children with father-hunger will start to speak up. Young people will start to notice that some of the differences between men and women actually matter. Mothers in same sex unions will start to notice that raising sons without fathers is harder than they had been led to believe. Suppressing all these feelings in all these people will simply not be possible indefinitely. Not everyone will remain silent. Abortion advocates never anticipated the Silent No More campaign, wherein women suffering the after-effects of their abortions began to speak up.  As time marches on, the brutality of the marriage “equality” regime will become just as obvious as the brutality of the abortion regime is today.

The children themselves will eventually have something to say about all this. Today, the energy and enthusiasm of the young is on the side of life. And in spite of everything we hear today, the same will be true of natural marriage. Conjugal marriage is the Right Side of History.


Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse is the President of the Ruth Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage, promoting lifelong married love to the Next Generation.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The essential purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. Absent this purpose, we would not need marriage as a distinct social institution. Human beings are not born as rational autonomous actors, they are the immature products of sexual relations between a man and a woman, and they need the assistance of adults to survive. Marriage exists, in all times and places, to solve this social problem. If our offspring were born as adults, ready to live independently, or if we reproduced through some form of asexual process, we would not need anything like marriage.

Marriage also has a profoundly social purpose. Marriage creates its own small society consisting of mother, father, and children. That small social unit contributes to the larger society by creating a functioning future—the next generation. Everyone benefits from having a next generation that can sustain the society and keep its institutions going. Even when I personally am old, and even if I have not had any children myself, I benefit from the fact that younger people are building cars and houses, providing medical and legal care, starting new businesses, and running old ones. In modern developed countries, the family also saves the state a lot of money by taking care of its own dependent young, rather than foisting that responsibility onto the taxpayers. Thus, the benefits of marriage go far beyond the benefits to the individual members of the family.

So, what did the Iowa Supreme Court have to say about the purposes of marriage? Did they view the requirement that marriage be between a man and a woman as a violation of the principle of equal protection? Indeed. As the Court argued, “Equal protection demands that laws treat alike all people who are ‘similarly situated with respect to the legitimate purposes of the law.’” If the Court can convince itself that the dual gender requirement bears no relationship to the State’s purpose in having a marriage statute in the first place, then that requirement violates the Equal Protection clause of the Iowa Constitution.

It should be evident that if the purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another, then the dual gender requirement is perfectly permissible. Same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are not the same with respect to this purpose. The Court had to come up with a very limited understanding of the purposes of marriage in order to maintain that opposite-sex and same-sex couples are in fact similarly situated.

The Court enumerated several purposes directly. Marriage provides an institutional basis for defining relational rights and responsibilities; marriage allows people to pool their resources; marriage recognizes people’s commitments; marriage provides comfort and happiness; marriage is a status, not a contract.

But these reasons do not explain why we need marriage in particular. I have a relationship with my next-door neighbor. My family pools resources with other members of a boat club. I have commitments to my employees and business associates. A pet brings me comfort and happiness. We do not need the unique relationship called marriage for any of these purposes.

The Court alluded to several other possible purposes, without including them within its list of state purposes. “Therefore, with respect to the subject and the purposes of Iowa’s marriage laws, we find that the plaintiffs are similarly situated compared to heterosexual persons. Plaintiffs are in committed and loving relationships, many raising families, just like heterosexual couples. Moreover, official recognition of their status provides an institutional basis for defining their fundamental relational rights and responsibilities, just as it does for heterosexual couples.”

The Court does not seem to realize that if these purposes really exhaust the list of legitimate state purposes of marriage, then there is no reason to have marriage as a distinct legal structure in the first place. Moreover, these are all private purposes, not public purposes, of marriage.

The same-sex couples before the Court claim to be committed and to love each other. Why do we need marriage for that? I’m committed to my sister. I love my best friend. Are we second class citizens because we are not married to each other? There is no state purpose whatsoever to be served by my having some legal statement or affirmation attached to my love for my sister. Besides, who really wants the Court, or the state or anyone else saying that our love is important to the state? People’s feelings are none of the state’s business.

The Court seems to understand this, for it gently and subtly elides the key issue of marriage law when it goes on to say: “Society benefits, for example, from providing same-sex couples a stable framework within which to raise their children . . . just as it does when that framework is provided for opposite-sex couples.” But wait a minute: How in the world does a same-sex couple obtain a child that is “theirs?”

This is precisely the way in which same-sex couples differ from opposite-sex couples. No child is born from a homosexual union. A child born to one of them has another parent who has been quietly escorted into the lab or the backdoor, to make the conception possible. That person is quickly escorted right back out the door, before he can claim any parental rights, or the child can claim any relational rights. Some of us believe that these two people, the child and the opposite-sex parent, require and deserve some protection. But the Court of Iowa does not think them even worth mentioning.

The social purpose of marriage has always been to attach mothers and fathers to their children, and to each other. This universal social purpose does not even make it onto the Iowa Court’s short list. The reason should be obvious: opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples are not similarly situated with respect to that purpose of marriage. If the Court found that attaching children to their parents and parents to one another is a purpose of marriage, they would be unable to sustain their claim that man woman marriage violates the principle of equal protection under the law.

Society needs marriage because children have rights to care from their parents, rights which they can not defend on their own. Societies create marriage to pro-actively protect the legitimate entitlements of children, and to provide for the future of the society. According to the Supreme Court of Iowa, these provisions for children are no longer the purpose of marriage. We are left to guess as to how this truly essential public function will be performed, now that the Court has surreptitiously removed it from the list of marriage’s jobs.

Iowa is a relatively homogenous and prosperous state. This newly created lacuna in the purposes of the law may not harm Iowa much at first. But other states have more diversity of opinion and practice about socially acceptable behavior, as well as greater economic and social stresses on married life and childrearing. In those states, the cost of redefining marriage is likely to be more pronounced and immediate.

In sum, the Court has elevated the private, inessential purposes of marriage to the highest point in the hierarchy of values of marriage. Given this new understanding, neither the longevity of marriage, nor fidelity within marriage can remain as important values. By the time the opponents of conjugal marriage are finished with their redefinitions, marriage will be little more than a five-year renewable-term contract. The Institution Formerly Known as Marriage will be nothing but a couple of individuals, loosely stapled together by the state.

Advocates of natural marriage, as opposed to genderless marriage, believe that society needs marriage to be a child-centered, gender-based social institution. We have been arguing all along that same-sex “marriage” will be a gender-neutral institution, in which children are only a peripheral concern. When the Supreme Court of Iowa established same-sex “marriage” by judicial decree, they proved our point for us.

Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., is the Founder and President of the Ruth Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

What is the social function of marriage? We can answer this by taking the perspective of the child as a rights-bearing person and asking what it is owed. Unlike adults, the child does not need autonomy or independence. The child is entitled to a relationship with and care from both of the people who brought him into being. Therefore, the child has a legitimate interest in the stability of his parents’ union. No child, however, can defend these entitlements himself. Nor is it adequate to make restitution after these rights have been violated. The child’s rights to care and relationship must be supported pro-actively, before harm is done, if those rights are to be protected at all.

Marriage is adult society’s institutional structure for protecting the legitimate interests of children. Marriage attaches mothers—and especially fathers—to their children, and attaches mothers and fathers to one another. As a result, marriage is every society’s preferred context for sexual activity and child-rearing. The often-heard objection that some marriages don’t have children stands the rationale for marriage on its head. It views marriage strictly from the adult’s perspective.

This is why marriage is not simply a special case of the market, and family law is not simply a subset of property and contract law. Marriage exists to meet the social necessity of caring for children, who are not and cannot be contracting parties. They are protected parties. At the same time, marriage should protect the interests of both parents in pursuing their common project of rearing their children.

The genius of marriage as an institution is just this: by providing an extremely minimal legal structure, the state facilitates a huge amount of voluntary cooperation. The state doesn’t care about the details of particular couples’ arrangements. As long as they fulfill the basic requirements, the state has no further concern. Marriage is a largely self-regulating, voluntary system of long-term cooperation between parents. If we “get the state out of the marriage business,” though, this is the structure we need to replace.

But what would it even mean for the state to “get out of the marriage business?” Presumably any couple, gay or straight, could create any “contract” they like to govern their relationship. In effect, everyone would have civil unions, and no one would have the default contract now known as marriage. At the same time, presumably, a couple could have any house of worship bless their union, on any terms agreeable to the couple and to the house of worship. We could have a Muslim contract that mandates that the bride be a virgin, a Las Vegas drive-through wedding contract, and anything in between. Religious bodies could only impose religious penalties, such as banning offenders from the sacraments or temple worship.

Part of the appeal of this proposal is that the state appears to be neutral and even-handed. The state is not favoring any one religious group, or any particular form of relational contract. But this appearance is deceptive.

The motivation to form a contract of a particular kind or indeed any contract at all depends largely on the “default” alternative position. For instance, a strong social safety net decreases the mother’s economic need to form a stable parenting alliance with the father. The state may decline to enforce certain kinds of agreements if it perceives things like sexual exclusivity or permanence to be oppressive relics of a backward time. Through the combination of tax policy, parental leave policy, education, housing and many other policies, the state can show implicit favoritism toward parenting as a solo activity or as a partnered activity, without ever explicitly declaring a preference for one over the other.

This is why the idea of “getting the government out of marriage” is an illusion. The state can, by changing the terms of these and many other social parameters, greatly influence the types of contracts people form. We have simply moved the problem, and the conflict, back a step. Instead of fighting over marriage, we will still have to slug it out over these background conditions. “Government neutrality” sounds good on the chalkboard, but in fact, it is not possible.

In one sense, the government has already removed itself from the marriage business by ceasing to enforce the most basic features of the current “default” marriage contract: stability and sexual fidelity. The no-fault divorce revolution makes marriage less than an ordinary contract. In most contracts, the person who breaches must make some kind of compensation to those who relied on his performance of the contract. Only in marriage does the law permit people to dissolve the contract for any reason or no reason and never even offer an account of themselves.

Couples today are on their own when it comes to maintaining a relationship stable enough to rear their children to adulthood. They may obtain some support from their faith communities and social circles, but parents must make substantial investments of human and financial capital, over a long period of time, with minimal contractual protection.

Now we can see what “getting the state out of marriage” likely means in actual practice. It means eliminating the default marriage contract, with these background conditions. We know that the state has already shown itself to be uninterested in enforcing sexual exclusivity and permanence. Social pressures to form stable unions are almost non-existent. Yet the “social safety net” for unmarried mothers and their children will not go away, and in fact would probably be strengthened if the government didn’t recognize marriage as such.

The most likely outcome, therefore, is that few people would even attempt to create a lifelong contract. The “prisoners’ dilemma” problem is at work here: it is publicly beneficial for society to have a norm of long-term marital stability, but it is in each couple’s private interests to write an escape clause for themselves into their own contract.

Would getting the state out of marriage make us freer? We can get a glimpse of the answer to this by looking at the impact of no-fault divorce. Presented to the public in the name of personal liberty, no-fault divorce has led to an increase in the power of the government over individual private lives. Family courts are one of the most intrusive institutions of the modern state, regulating how mothers and fathers spend their time and money. People under the jurisdiction of family courts can have virtually all of their private lives subject to its scrutiny. This is not an increase in freedom: it is an unprecedented insertion of the state into domestic matters.

Neither will an increase in “multi-partner fertility” (we won’t be able to call it “out-of-wedlock” childbearing any more) increase personal liberty. The state currently gets involved in regulating disputes between never-married parents, with all the same problems of intrusive family courts. Historically, the state’s attempts to make unmarried fathers to pay child support are much less successful than attempts to get divorced fathers to pay. And taxpayers will be on the hook for even greater expenditures for additional social services, since the outcomes for children are predictably dismal. Personal liberty will decrease, whether liberty is defined in terms of privacy or economics.

Some might say we should completely deregulate relationships between adults. The only interest the state should have is in the protection of children. The state shouldn’t care at all about the relationship between the adults, only whether the child’s needs are being met.

But this is essentially what we are already doing with the children of unmarried parents. The outcomes for these children are not the sort of thing we would want to expand to the entire population. These children have poorer life chances in virtually every dimension we can measure, even taking into account their parents’ lower incomes. The fact that the children of unmarried mothers so often end up in the child welfare system tells us that their needs are not being met. Besides, we would have to come to some consensus about what needs children have that warrant state protection.

In short, we cannot avoid the large, public questions involved in the definition of marriage, even if we want to. One way or another, every society does have preferences and beliefs about the proper context for sexual behavior and child rearing. One way or another, we have to answer the question of what is owed to children. We would be much better off having that discussion, honestly and openly. As things now stand, we are obsessing over fairness to adults while avoiding even talking about what is owed to children. “Getting the state out of the marriage business” is not a reasonable compromise but a complete abdication of our responsibility to face the important question of how we provide children with their just entitlements.

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse is the Founder and President of the Ruth Institute, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote lifelong married love to the young by creating an intellectual and social climate favorable to marriage.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.