This is the centerpiece of Murray’s argument: The American project can be sustained only by virtue; and culture, more than politics or economics, is the social force that sustains (or corrupts) our virtues. The Founders knew this. For them, it was a truism that our republican form of self-government depended on a virtuous people who could exercise individual self-governance. And from the founding generation until 1960, a shared national culture fostered the virtues necessary to sustain both the American project and our authentic happiness, which Murray defines as “lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.”

But since 1960, Murray argues, the virtues of the bottom third of America’s population have weakened, and two social classes with divergent cultures and little interaction have emerged, threatening the future of the American project. His thesis leaves us wondering how this happened and how we can fix it, but his book disappoints those who seek causal explanations or plausible solutions. He focuses on the scene before us, not on how it arose or how we can change it. (I should add that the cultural changes he reports aren’t based on race or ethnicity; Murray filters out these variables by focusing on non-Latino “white America.”)

Murray defines the “founding virtues” as industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion. The basic idea is that one should work hard to get ahead in life, follow the law and keep one’s word, be faithful to one’s spouse and do right by one’s children, and worship that author of the universe who makes everything—morality included—intelligible. Culture long sustained these virtues through fraternal organizations such as the Elks, Moose, and Odd Fellows, television, cinema and radio, the Sunday pulpit, and the McGuffey Readers used in American schools.

For Murray, what made America exceptional before 1960 was that almost everyone shared and participated in this culture. The rich and powerful weren’t hermetically sealed off from the rest of society. People tended to view themselves and treat others as if all were of the same class. He points, for example, to a 1963 Gallup poll in which “95 percent of the respondents said they were working class (50 percent) or middle class (45 percent).” Following Tocqueville’s observation that “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations,” this attitude built up what Robert Putnam termed “social capital”—connections to other people, norms of reciprocity, trust, and neighborliness. These voluntary associations, Murray notes, “drew their membership from across the social classes, and ensured regular, close interaction among people of different classes.” And the classes weren’t all that different: they lived out the same virtues, valued the same goods, and led similar lifestyles. They watched the same TV stations, listened to the same music, ate the same food, lived in homes more or less comparable, drove similar cars.

The culture of the 1940’s and 1950’s taught Murray what it meant to be a man:

To be a man means that you are brave, loyal, and true. When you are in the wrong, you own up and take your punishment. You don’t take advantage of women. As a husband, you support and protect your wife and children. You are gracious in victory and a good sport in defeat. Your word is your bond. Your handshake is as good as your word. It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. When the ship goes down, you put the women and children into the lifeboats and wave good-bye with a smile.

He admits that his summary sounds like a list of clichés, but that’s his point: “they were clichés precisely because boys understood that this was the way they were supposed to behave.” School, church, and the airwaves reinforced the message: “It was taken for granted that television programs were supposed to validate the standards that were commonly accepted as part of ‘the American way of life’—a phrase that was still in common use in 1963.” It was a time, in fact, when the Production Code of the Motion Picture Association of America could include this line: “The subject of abortion shall be discouraged, shall never be more than suggested, and when referred to shall be condemned.” Murray isn’t blind to the many problems that plagued America during this time—racism, sexism, poverty, pollution—but he insists that the culture did support many crucial virtues.

And then it came apart. In the past 50 years, a “new upper class” and a “new lower class” have formed. The new upper class, accounting for about 20 percent of the population, has been formed by competitive admissions in higher education that select for intelligence, a new economy that values cognitive ability above all else, and marriage patterns that couple successful intelligent people, who go on to have equally talented children. Living, working, and socializing together, they’ve formed a distinct upper-class culture while continuing to live out the founding virtues: crime is low and industriousness is high, predictably, but they also marry, stay married, and practice religion at remarkably high levels. And, as a result, they’re pretty happy.

Things aren’t so good for the lower 30 percent. Few people go to college, only half of those aged 30–49 are married (and their marriages aren’t as happy as those on the top), 45 percent of their children are born out of wedlock, only 60 percent of adults work at least 40 hours a week (only 53 percent since the recession), crime is up, and religious practice is down: 60 percent are religiously disengaged, and only 12 percent, by Murray’s estimate, constitute the “religious core.” This last factor is particularly troubling, for as Putnam noted, about “half of all associational memberships are church-related.” Not surprisingly, these behaviors produce rather unhappy lives.

Murray’s observations aren’t novel. David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise popularized some of these trends at the top, and Brad Wilcox’s research at the University of Virginia has highlighted them at the bottom and top, and in the middle. While Murray doesn’t explain what caused the bottom third’s plight, he does note broader cultural changes that began at the same time: the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the sexual revolution and introduction of the contraceptive pill, and the introduction of government welfare programs through the War on Poverty. Surely these had some impact.

So how does one rebuild a common culture, one that promotes virtue for those on the bottom? Murray predicts two futures. His pessimistic vision sees a hollow elite. Though they enjoy great wealth and social capital, the new upper class lacks the self-confidence necessary to defend the founding virtues. They ascribe to “ecumenical niceness,” whereby one is to live and let live. They “lost self-confidence in the rightness of [their] own customs and values, and preach nonjudgmentalism instead.” This attitude contributes to the “unseemliness” of some elite behavior: Aaron Spellings’ 56,500-square-foot home and a Pfizer CEO’s $99 million golden parachute (after poor performance) are prime examples. If the elite really are hollow, then for Murray “all is lost”: the class is “as dysfunctional in its way as the new lower class is in its way.”

Murray’s optimistic outlook, however, foresees a great civic awakening. Murray favors this event as the likely future, though tentatively and for impressionistic reasons. He predicts the following: The elite will wish to avoid an American version of the European collapses. They will realize that the welfare state cannot work for scientific, moral, and fiscal reasons. And they will rally around American ideals, start “preaching what they practice,” and engage the bottom of society. Murray doesn’t ask that the elite “sacrifice their self-interest,” only that they recognize its breadth: “a life well lived requires engagement with those around us.” Though it might “be pleasant to lead a glossy life, it is ultimately more rewarding—and more fun—to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.”

I have trouble seeing this prediction as a viable solution to the problems Murray has described. First, too many elites are deeply committed to the sexual revolution and secularism—and thus are actively working to undermine the founding virtues of marriage and religion. Second, I fear that many of the new elites practice the founding virtues only for their utility, not their moral value.

As to the first point, Brooks in his review claims that Murray’s data show that “it’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.” But is this really true if the Hugh Hefners and Margaret Sangers of the world shaped American culture post–1960? Today’s popular culture no longer promotes the founding virtues—we need only consider our music, movies, television shows, and the public morality imposed on us. There’s no denying that there has been a coordinated effort to undermine the family, morality, and religion in America.

As to the second point, I’ve noticed a sort of practical Machiavellianism among the undergraduates I’ve taught—many of whom come from and are going to the new upper class, though most are of the middle. Insofar as they behave in ways that conform to traditional morality, it’s largely because they’ve figured out that those behaviors lead to the most practical success. Rather than practicing moral virtues, they’ve acquired Machiavelli’s “effective truth,” virtu. They’re good utility-maximizers. But they don’t believe in a binding morality, in obligations to virtuous behavior, or in any sort of moral sanction from God. If they do believe in God, it’s a God without demands. It’s what Christian Smith described as a “therapeutic deism.”

You can even see this phenomenon in Murray’s own language. The harshest denunciation he can muster is to call something “unseemly”—a term more suggestive of aesthetic than binding moral judgment. And the biggest push he can give the new upper class to help the new lower class is to say that a “textured life” is more fulfilling than a “glossy” one.

We are left with an elite who through education, law, and media have torn down the values and beliefs that made America prosperous, even while they still behave more or less in accord with those values for strategic, utility-maximizing reasons. If this is true, I don’t foresee the optimistic future in which they choose to interact with the lower class, nor how their engagement could fix the problems of the lower class. University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax has noted that we need to create and sustain “simple rules for simple people.” While the particularly cunning may be able to navigate this world by cost-benefit analysis for their long-term happiness, most people can’t. They’ll default into maximizing their short-term welfare. What we need, and used to have, are a series of shortcuts, heuristics, mores, and life-scripts—culture—that help people navigate their lives without recreating the rules from scratch.

Wax’s analysis “reveals why preserving a ‘marriage culture’ is not just a matter of ideological commitment. Its most important effects are in encouraging the daily habits of thought and action that foster lasting bonds. Strong marriage norms help guide and shape decisions that lead to optimal choices.” Other research shows both that marriage causes behavioral change and that non-marriage can explain cultural pathologies. As the late Steve Nock demonstrated, after their wedding men tend to spend more time at work, less time at bars, more time at religious gatherings, less time in jail, and more time with family.

But I don’t see how Murray’s suggestions will restore this lifestyle. Regardless of the technicalities, the recent discussions on Public Discourse show that God and morality are linked at a conceptual level—and even more strongly on a psychological and motivational level. What’s more likely to prompt a new elite to interact with the poor: a discussion of unseemly behavior and textured life, or seeing Christ in the poor and hearing commandments to love one’s neighbor? What’s more likely to help restore the founding virtues: documenting how they lead to long-term self-interest and utility-maximization, or believing that God desires virtue of his people and sanctions those who fail to practice them—especially those who work to destroy them?

Murray is right to remind us that republican self-government relies on virtue, and that virtue needs the support of culture. But he should go a step further to ask what creates culture. George Weigel reminds us that at the heart of culture is cult, religion. Murray’s data and analysis don’t tell us enough about the types of religion being practiced, and the specific beliefs being fostered. Therapeutic deism and sexual revolution a healthy culture do not make. But a morally demanding God, with transcendent values, just might.

Ryan T. Anderson is Editor of Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good.

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Though they are not alone, the most obvious culprits are some of my fellow Roman Catholics. It is pretty serious when a Catholic says, “I am personally opposed to same-sex unions; nonetheless, I will not only support such unions, but I will sponsor the bill to make it happen.” Most people would automatically, and reasonably, come to the conclusion that such a person is not being honest: he is neither personally opposed, nor following the faith he professes. For this person, “personally opposed” must have a very peculiar meaning, unshared by most of the population.

Such an accusation rankles the fervent “personally opposed” devotee, because he sincerely believes that his is the proper course of action. His argument about marriage, for example, tends to look something like this: Civil marriage is completely different from religious marriage. If a religion thinks it is proper to keep marriage between one man and one woman, that is no concern of civil authorities. Similarly, religion has no authority to say what civil marriage is. Since it is a purely civil affair, it must be ruled by purely civil laws, especially the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. The push for same-sex unions and polygamy, then, is just a case of providing equal rights.

Let us leave aside the question of whether these statements accurately reflect the faith tradition in which our “personally opposed” friend claims membership. (Catholic teaching, for example, holds quite the opposite: that as a natural institution, marriage is the union of one man and one woman.) If you are truly opposed, yet you truly believe that the Constitution will not permit your position to be enshrined in law, then your task is to change the law—including, if necessary, the Constitution—to reflect what you believe to be the truth for human beings and the best for society. At the very least, your duty is to not exacerbate the situation.

Yet our “personally opposed” congregant operates according to a strange moral arithmetic in which his professed moral stance is canceled out by current law, to the point that he is not even permitted to try to change the law. These people are then left to follow a lesser law as though it is an absolute. It is as though they feel the need to do something, and since their own vision of the good has been stymied, they start working to forward someone else’s vision of the good.

What could so definitively stop their acting on their own asserted beliefs, according to their own conscience, that they are compelled to act according to someone else’s conscience? For, if we take them at their word, that is what they are doing. The claim seems to be that no one who believes something to be right or wrong based on a faith-claim or based on someone else’s authority may act and vote according to his or her own conscience. One person put it to me this way: “Please spare me the lecture about natural law. We live in a multi-faith democracy and not a theocracy. Catholics do not, under our system of government, get to dictate what kind of marriage non-Catholics can have.”

This is a strange argument, for several reasons.

First and most obvious, this argument is utterly at odds with the long-standing tradition in this nation of opposition to the status quo (e.g., to slavery, to Jim Crow laws, to war, to the death penalty, to immigration or economic policy), grounded precisely on religious moral principles.

Second, faith is not opposed to reason. Many people are nervous about any claim rooted in faith, because they take faith to be something opposed to reason. It is not. Faith is an act of trust in the sobriety and authority of the person who bears witness to certain news. This puts our “personally opposed, but …” acolytes in an uncomfortable position, for there is no one who does not believe in many things based on the authority and testimony of others. We cannot possibly go about rediscovering every claim in science, history, and philosophy. We all accept many things on testimony and authority, without direct and independent evidence. We cannot thereby rule out such testimony and authority when it comes to making public policy.

Third, the natural law is not, in itself, a matter of faith. It has been with us in one form or another since before Plato and Aristotle. It is the basis for the entire Anglo-American legal system (although many practitioners within that system have been influenced by legal positivism). Admittedly, many faith traditions accept some version of natural law. Admittedly, many of the faithful accept the natural law based on the authority of others. But that does not mean that the natural law is itself an article of faith, since many accept it without any reference to faith.

Fourth, the argument abuses the notion of theocracy. The Founding Fathers took certain truths to be not faith-based but self-evident, available to any reasoning person—including the claim that we are endowed with inalienable rights by our Creator. They also believed, by and large, that a religious citizenry is the only possible grounding for a working self-government. If this is theocracy, then the United States has been a theocracy since its inception, and working toward a solution according to faith-based principles of right and wrong is not only clearly constitutional, but also expected of every caring citizen. If, on the other hand, the Founding Fathers did not found a theocracy, then the Constitution clearly affords us the wherewithal to accommodate both religious freedom and a robust application of our moral beliefs to the law.

Furthermore, in our system, members of any faith could tell everyone what marriage is—if they have the votes. What they certainly would not do is tell others what to believe or how to worship.Freedom of conscience and of worship is a fundamental human right that is part of the truth about the human person and preexists the law, and the law must recognize and defend that freedom in order to have any claim to legitimacy. However, when it comes not to thoughts and beliefs but to human actions with public consequences, law must have something to say, and therefore the people who are ruled by the law must have something to say, as well, no matter what their faith tradition or lack thereof. In that regard, a majority of Americans, when given the opportunity to vote, demonstrates a belief that there is a truth about the human person and human marriage that preexists human law and that human law must respect, if it is to be fully justified.

There are other possible interpretations of “personally opposed” that some might think could justify the “but.” We might remember that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in its Goodridge decision (2003) accepting same-sex “marriage,” denied its own long-established precedent, quoting the United States Supreme Court’s Casey decision (1992) in support of its conclusion that morality could no longer be considered a rational ground for law. In that ruling, we find this passage: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”

At first glance, this passage is merely a defense of freedom of thought, but given its context as a defense of the abortion regime, it is so much more. Taken to its logical conclusion, it affirms that, to be a person, one has to be able to decide for oneself what is important and then act on it. Just having the right to decide for myself who counts as a person is not enough; I must be able then to kill those I find do not measure up, lest I have no liberty, and thus no personhood. In the marriage context, it apparently means that, whatever I believe or want marriage to be, it can be that, and the law is powerless against my desires.

This is a passage that goes beyond utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill and his followers held that human beings are only fulfilled in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and that the way to maximize pleasure is to allow as much liberty as practical so that people may pursue these ends. But even Mill thought that one’s right to swing one’s own arm ended at someone else’s nose. There are no such brakes on one’s actions in the “heart of liberty” passage. Taken literally, the passage demands that the law never forbid an action if there is any disagreement about its justification. Since there will always be someone who disagrees, there really can never be laws about anything. In such a world, the powerless are at the mercy of the powerful.

Those in favor of such an expansive version of liberty, and thus an expansive version of marriage and sexuality, seem to recognize this fact and use it to their advantage over those who think that civil law and ordered liberty are grounded in some truth about human beings and moral law. This latter group continues to believe that there are such things as human rights that preexist the civil law, including rights to freedom of conscience and worship. Thus, they tend to respect these rights in those with whom they disagree—that is, they tend to a certain level of tolerance.

The former group, while ostensibly extolling tolerance, cannot tolerate that which threatens their own practices of liberty, including points of view that oppose their own. Such thoughts become the crime of hate speech. Many across the globe, and an increasing number in this country, are facing the wrath of these lovers of pure liberty (for themselves).

Under such a regime, only the conscience of one side can be tolerated. All opposing consciences must be silenced. Today, the intolerant have not simply silenced a surprising number of opposing consciences; they have convinced those silenced people to join with them, and rejoice at the opportunity. As we have shown, such people are either dishonest about their opposition or mightily confused. But make no mistake: when the apostles of the “heart of liberty” come to full power, the “but” is not going to save you if you are “personally opposed.”

Stephen J. Heaney is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, MN.

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A law is unjust only if the distinction it creates is not essentially related to a legitimate purpose of law. But whatever one holds about the morality of homosexual acts, it is clear that the state does have an interest in promoting and regulating marriage as traditionally defined, and that the sexual relationships of same-sex couples are distinct in kind from that. So, even if—contrary to fact—the state did have an interest in promoting same-sex sexual relationships, that interest would be different from the one served by promoting marriage. And so the two types of relationships or arrangements should not be lumped together. Moreover, falsely to equate the two is to obscure the nature of marriage.

What is marriage? The traditional view of marriage is: the union of a man and a woman, who have consented to share their lives, on the bodily (sexual), emotional, and spiritual levels, in the kind of community that would be fulfilled by having and raising children together.

Two points need emphasis here. First, marriage is a bodily union, as well as emotional and spiritual. For in sexual intercourse—which consummates the marital union—the spouses become biologically one: they complete each other to form a single subject of a single biological action, the kind of action that could procreate, provided conditions outside their conduct are present. This biological union (a procreative-type act) embodies their procreative-type union (provided they have consented to share their lives in that kind of union).

Second, marriage is the kind of union whose fruition is procreation. It is the kind of union that would be fulfilled by having and raising children together; the union of the spouses is embodied, prolonged, and enriched by enlarging into family. Still, marriage is not a mere means in relation to procreation, but a sharing of lives (bodily, emotionally, and spiritually) that is good in itself—and so a man and a woman who have consented to such a multi-leveled union are genuinely married, and have an intrinsically fulfilling marital union, even if it turns out they cannot procreate together.

Now of course not all agree with the traditional definition of marriage. But the point I want to make is simply this: marriage, as traditionally defined, is a distinct type of community and not an arbitrary set. Unmarried cohabitators have a different type of relationship. Alliances to raise children also are not necessarily marriages: a group of celibate religious women running an orphanage, for example, are not married. And, plainly, same-sex sexual relationships are a different kind of relationship: they cannot become biologically one, nor is their relationship of the kind that would find its fruition in conceiving, bearing, and raising children together. (True, same-sex partners can form an alliance to raise children—for example, those from a previous marriage or produced by artificial reproduction; but that alliance is not an extension or prolongation of a bodily-emotional-spiritual union already begun, as is the case in marriage.)

Now it is precisely the distinctive features of marriage that ground the state’s interest in promoting and regulating it, and that make the general strength or health of marriage a public good. First, marriage is a distinctive way in which men and women are fulfilled, an irreducible aspect of their flourishing, and one that can be easily misunderstood. And so marriage needs cultural support—and can be harmed by cultural confusion about it. Clarity within the general culture about the value and nature of marriage enables young men and women, as well as those already married, to participate more fully than they otherwise would in this distinctive good—just as a clear public understanding of health or learning assists individuals and families to participate more fully in those goods.

Second, while good in itself, and not a mere means to an extrinsic end, marriage also provides the crucial social function of encouraging parents (and potential parents) to commit to each other and to whatever children they may have. A healthy and strong marriage culture will provide the safest and healthiest environment for children. For these reasons it is in everyone’s interest for the state to promote a sound understanding of marriage, and certainly to avoid obscuring its nature.

Since a same-sex couple is unable to form the kind of union marriage is, not granting same-sex couples marriage licenses is simply a decision by the state not to engage in a confusing and harmful fiction. Marriage is a certain kind of union. Denying a marriage license—or the privileges, protections, and obligations of marriage—to those who are unable to marry is not unjust discrimination. The state denies marriage licenses to threesomes or foursomes (refraining from declaring polyamorous groups marriages) and denies marriage licenses to twelve-year-olds (requiring valid consent for a marriage). These denials are not unjust because threesomes, foursomes, and twelve-year-olds are unable to form the kind of union that marriage is. But the same is true of same-sex couples. So, just as the distinction between eighteen-year-olds and twelve-year-olds is relevant to the purpose of marriage—because the former but not the latter are actually able to form the union that is marriage—in the same way, the distinction between opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples is relevant to the purpose of the marriage laws, because the former but not the latter can actually form the kind of union that marriage is.

According to same-sex “marriage” proponents, the public interest served by marriage laws is the stability of households. For example, in striking down California’s pro-marriage constitutional amendment called Proposition 8, Judge Vaughn Walker claimed: “The state regulates marriage because marriage creates stable households, which in turn form the basis of a stable, governable populace.” Stability of households might of course be a legitimate public aim, but laws to promote that (and to provide benefits and privileges for stable households as such) are not marriage laws. Such laws, benefits, and so on, would—if applied justly—have to be given also to groups who do not have sexual relationships and groups not pledging permanence and exclusivity.

Clearly, though, same-sex “marriage” supporters want much more than certain benefits and privileges. Discussion of concrete benefits such as hospital visitation, inheritance rights, and so on, is really a side issue—such benefits could be secured by other means for individuals who need them (for example, a durable power of attorney for health care, a will, etc.). Nor—contrary to how it is usually portrayed—is the same-sex marriage proposal aimed at tolerance, since persons with same-sex attractions are already free to engage in private sexual behavior and to establish for themselves long-term romantic and sexual relationships. Rather, what proponents of same-sex “marriage” principally desire is the social affirmation and endorsement of homosexual relationships as such. Judge Walker indicated this point clearly in his Proposition 8 decision: “Plaintiffs [some same-sex couples] seek to have the state recognize their committed relationships . . . . Perry and Stier seek to be spouses; they seek the mutual obligation and honor that attend marriage.”

So, the proposal is for the state to promote something called marriage, and that marriage is to be understood in a way that will include same-sex partners. This sounds like old news. But what, on their view, is the thing called “marriage,” and why should the state promote it? What distinguishes marital unions from others, such that the state should promote them? One cannot just pronounce that these couples will now count as married; there must be something one means by “being married,” something held in common by all married couples. But the same-sex “marriage” position cannot provide a coherent account of what that something is.

If marriage is not a bodily, emotional, and spiritual union of a man and a woman, of the kind that would be fulfilled by procreation, then what makes a union marriage and why should the state support it? It is not simply a union that is formed by a wedding ceremony: that would be a circular definition. Nor is every romantic and sexual relationship a marriage, and certainly there is no point in the state promoting all such relationships. Perhaps one will say that it is a stable, committed, and exclusive romantic-sexual relationship. But how stable would a romantic-sexual relationship need to be in order to be a marriage? Suppose John and Mary have a romantic-sexual relationship while college students but plan to go their separate ways after graduation: is that stable enough to be a marriage? If not, why not?

Or suppose Joe, Jim, and Steve have a committed, stable, romantic-sexual relationship among themselves—a polyamorous relationship. On what ground can the state promote the relationship between couples, but not the relationship among Joe, Jim, and Steve? The argument here is not a slippery slope one. Rather, the point is: There must be some non-arbitrary features shared by relationships that the state promotes which make them apt for public promotion, and make it fair for the state not to promote in the same way other relationships lacking those features. Without this the distinction is invidious discrimination. The conjugal understanding of marriage has a clear answer: (a) marriage is a distinct basic human good, that needs social support and that uniquely provides important social functions; (b) marriage’s organic bodily union and inherent orientation to procreation distinguish it from other relationships similar in superficial respects to it. But the same-sex marriage proposal’s conception of marriage has no answer. In fact, its conception of marriage is actually an arbitrarily selected class, and so the enactment of this proposal would be unjust.

The problem is not solved if one adds to one’s description or definition of marriage, that it must be a permanent commitment (as Judge Margaret Marshall did in her decision striking down Massachusetts’ marriage law: “It is the exclusive and permanent commitment of the marriage partners to one another, not the begetting of children, that is the sine qua non of civil marriage”). For it is fair to ask: why should the commitment be exclusive and permanent? The college students’ relationship (lacking permanence) and the celibate monks’ relationship (lacking exclusivity—others can join the religious order), both form households and contribute to social stability. In contrast, the conjugal understanding of marriage allows a clear answer to these questions: since marriage is a bodily and procreative-type union, and an irreducible basic good, it is non-arbitrarily distinct from other types of relationships. The promotion of this kind of relationship, for its own sake (because it is a basic good), and for the sake of children generally (since a strong marriage culture provides a safe haven for children), makes it in accord with justice to recognize, as marriage, only a relationship between a man and a woman, pledged to be permanent and exclusive. The conjugal conception of marriage is just and coherent; the same-sex marriage proponents’ conception of marriage is unjust and incoherent.

Patrick Lee is John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Professor of Bioethics at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

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In her new book, American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party, Margaret Hoover renews this argument. (The book’s title and inspiration derive from a booklet of the same name by Hoover’s great-grandfather, Herbert Hoover.) Here she argues that the Republican brand is damaged because social conservatives appear to dominate the party, which “has caused millennials to tune us out.” Hence Hoover writes with two aims: to convince Republicans that millennials—roughly anyone born between 1980 and 1999—are not a “lost cause,” and to convince millennials that they should give Republicans another hearing. But to appeal to this audience’s alleged hostility to the third leg of the stool, Hoover feels compelled to pull out her pocketknife and sharpen it.

According to Hoover, the three-legged stool’s fusionism emerged as a response to a common enemy: Communism. In a post-Communist era, Hoover argues that a new fusionism must rally under the banner of fiscal discipline, which, when embedded in “rugged individualism”—a sort of individual freedom quickened with “community spirit”—can appeal to the millennial generation. Hoover applies this framework in a wide-ranging tour through contemporary American policy debates.

Millennials and conservatives alike will welcome Hoover’s powerful case against “generational theft.” Millennials are rather like latecomers to a posh dinner party thrown by their parents and grandparents. After a nibble of dessert and a sip of leftover Dom Perignon, they find the party deserted and are left stuck with the tab. The growing realization among millennials that they will be footing today’s welfare state bill for many years to come means they are ready to embrace a program of fiscal sanity. And given their widespread sense that almost anything can be customized to their individual needs, Hoover persuasively argues that their natural home is the party that has coupled spending, tax, and entitlement reform with an emphasis on individual choice and responsibility in health-care plans, retirement savings, and education. Moreover, Hoover reminds us that the events of 9/11 were formative for millennials and made them vividly aware that American values are in the crosshairs. Republicans are well-situated to remind millennials that, while we are emphatically not at war with Islam, we are at war with radical Islamist supremacists.

But what should we make of her call for Republicans to “emphasize economic values and deemphasize social issues”? Hoover contends that only this decision will help Republicans avoid being perceived as a “fire-and-brimstone party.” While Hoover’s tone might strike the reader as moderate, her message for social conservatives is loud and clear: stop talking about abortion and marriage, and get with the program.

Hoover labels abortion a “second-tier issue,” as if it didn’t concern the most fundamental questions of justice and the common good. Surely this is an odd assertion for someone claiming to champion the dignity of the individual person. Some scholars would trace Hoover’s libertarian-like “rugged individualism” (however tempered by a weak-sauce “community spirit”) back to the individualism of Hobbes and Locke, the “founders” of modern liberalism. Whatever the merits of that pedigree of liberalism, Hobbes and Locke agree with Aquinas on at least this point: a necessary feature of any just government will be the protection of all human beings within its jurisdiction from arbitrary acts of violence. So when Hoover parrots the platitude of being “personally prolife but politically pro-choice” as if it were the pragmatic, reasoned alternative to “absolutist” positions, one wonders whether she has really thought her position through. Either the genetically distinct, self-moving, self-integrating, individuated human being in the womb is a person and hence deserving of basic equal protection of the laws from arbitrary acts of violence—or he or she is not a person, in which case, on what grounds would one be “personally” prolife? To be “personally” prolife necessarily entails being “politically” prolife, or it is nonsense.

The relevant polling data suggests that millennials are more prolife than their parents. Fifty-eight percent of millennials believe abortion is “morally wrong” while 74 percent favor at least some legal restrictions on abortion. Notably, millennials are now the demographic most likely to believe abortion ought to be illegal in all circumstances. If anything, the character of the new generation suggests that the GOP shouldn’t mute its pro-life credentials if it wants to win.

Given Hoover’s emphasis on fiscal discipline, one might have expected for her to call for some kind of truce on marriage. Instead, Hoover dismisses arguments that favor protecting marriage in a few paragraphs and spends a chapter citing familiar “marriage equality” arguments. She concludes that the legal recognition of same-sex unions as marriages is entirely consistent with Republican principles of maximizing individual freedom and equal opportunity. Hoover thinks that millennials will find these arguments appealing because of their more libertarian leanings on economic and sexual issues. Let us abstract for the moment from the abundant social science evidence documenting the positive benefits for civil society of traditional marriage (and the likelihood that the exponential rise in federal spending to fight poverty since the 1960s has been ineffective because policymakers have failed to see that poverty is often a symptom of the breakdown of the traditional family). Still, why should it follow that Republicans have an imperative to recognize same-sex unions in the law as marriages?

Millennial libertarianism suggests that there is still wide agreement across the generations that the government has no business regulating most of our intimate friendships. (To see the point, we need only reflect for a moment on the absurdity of the government issuing chess-buddy licenses and specially protecting permanent and exclusive chess-buddy unions or analogous friendships.) But if true, the burden would be on the government to justify the importance of singling out a new form of friendship for special protection and benefits. A centuries-old tradition of law picked out opposite-sex unions for the good reason that such unions were the kind that produce children. What could be more to the common good than what John Rawls called the “orderly reproduction of society over time”? The burden rests on same-sex marriage proponents to justify the creation of a new entity in law as a requirement of the common good.

As far as I can make out, Hoover’s justification is that the current law denies equality. Yet Hoover makes no effort to explain what marriage is, and so we have no idea whether anyone’s equal rights have been violated when some unions are denied the status of marriage. Still, through the emotive morass of argumentation, one can discern that Hoover thinks marriage is or ought to be something like “any two consenting, committed persons who love each other.” Now who is denying equality? Why does justice only require the recognition of dyadic unions? This is not a slippery-slope question but a matter of principle, if we are talking about protecting the equal rights of all—including the equal rights of people in loving, committed polyamorous relationships.

At any rate, it is not clear that Hoover’s gaze into the crystal ball really reveals that millennials are the crest of the tide of history, inevitably hurtling us toward gay marriage. With millennials favoring the legalization of gay marriage by a 50 percent to 36 percent margin, with the remainder undecided (according to a Pew Research Center study), the future seems rather more ambiguous. The challenge for Republicans is not self-censorship, but to articulate and defend marriage as an essential aspect of the common good.

Hoover set out to hew off the Republican Party’s social conservative leg to gain a hearing with millennials, but instead of offering serious arguments that demonstrate precisely where prolife and traditional marriage arguments fail, she offers quick and easy slogans and emotional anecdotes. These offerings may reaffirm the prejudices of some readers, but it is doubtful that anyone who has reflected seriously on these matters will be persuaded.

Deirdre Cooper is a millennial and Public Policy Analyst for Texas Alliance for Life.

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A recent national survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) provides a closer look at public opinion on same-sex marriage. The survey was funded by the Arcus Foundation, an organization that champions the rights of gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual persons. According to the 2011 PRRI survey, views on same-sex marriage are evenly divided among the U.S. population as a whole: 47 percent of Americans favor it and 47 percent oppose it. Interestingly, this national survey reveals that 62 percent of Millennials (age 18 to 29) favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. In contrast, only 31 percent of senior citizens (age 65 and older) report favoring same-sex marriage. The fact that Millennials are twice as likely as senior citizens to support same-sex marriage provides important evidence of a generation gap on this hot-button issue.

The media coverage of the PRRI survey, however, has painted a very different picture of the findings, drawing the more general conclusion that younger Americans are pro-gay while senior citizens are anti-gay. But does the PRRI survey, as well as other recent national surveys, provide data actually supporting such a conclusion? The 2010 Baylor Religion Survey (BRS) contains relevant questions regarding views on homosexuality that may be helpful in gaining a more accurate understanding of the degree to which there exists a generation gap on the specific issue of gay marriage, as well as the issue of homosexuality more generally. Like the PRRI and other national surveys, the BRS reports that 63 percent of Millennials favor same-sex marriage, while only 33 percent of seniors support same-sex marriage. Additionally, the BRS found that 74 percent of Millennials and 56 percent of seniors agree that “homosexuals should be allowed civil unions.” Though Millennials are significantly more likely to support civil unions, it is not the dramatic split found in support of gay marriage. This finding confirms that civil unions are significantly more palatable than gay marriage for younger as well as older Americans.

Several other questions on the BRS shed additional light by asking questions on homosexuality as well as gay marriage. For instance, the BRS finds there is essentially no difference between Millennials and senior citizens in response to this survey question: “Homosexuals should have equal employment opportunities.” Fully 93 percent of Millennials and 90 percent of senior citizens agreed with that statement. In other words, both young and old Americans overwhelmingly (9 out of 10) believe that homosexuals should have equal employment opportunities. If older Americans are indeed anti-gay, one would not expect 90 percent of senior citizens to support equal employment opportunities for homosexuals.

Millennials and older Americans actually respond in much the same way when asked another question about homosexuality. For example, 54 percent of Millennials and 59 percent of seniors agree with the statement: “People are born either as homosexual or heterosexual.” Finally, Millennials are slightly more likely than seniors to agree with the statement: “Do people choose to be homosexual?” Thus, one can argue that Millennials are more similar than they are dissimilar to senior citizens when asked questions about homosexuality.

As stated earlier, the one area where there is a dramatic divergence of opinion between the young and the old is on support for same-sex marriage (62 percent and 31 percent respectively). Perhaps the striking difference between the views of the young and the elderly on gay marriage is merely a function of the fact that Millennials are much more likely to be exposed to homosexuals or have homosexual acquaintances than senior citizens are. But this is not the case, as there is very little difference between Millennials and seniors, with the vast majority (87 percent and 82 percent respectively) indicating that they “personally know someone who is homosexual.” Simply put, it is inappropriate on methodological grounds to draw the conclusion that opposition to same-sex marriage is synonymous with being anti-gay.

But what are we to make of the undeniable evidence that older Americans (age 65 and older) are twice as likely as young Americans (age 18 to 29) to oppose same-sex marriage (62 percent and 31 percent respectively)? Why is there such a large age effect when it comes to views on gay marriage? I offer two possibilities for consideration.

First, since the issue of gay marriage is a relatively new one, it makes sense that younger Americans have had to confront the issue much earlier in life and with far more social pressure. Americans age 65 and older grew up in a time when they simply did not have to contend with the issue of gay marriage. Millennials, on the other hand, have not been as fortunate as their older counterparts. Most young Americans between the ages of 18 to 29 have been exposed to the issue of gay marriage throughout their adolescence and young adulthood. This is especially true of youth attending public schools in the last several decades. Indeed, public schools in recent years have been much more likely to utilize curricula in support of favorable rather than unfavorable attitudes toward homosexuality and gay marriage. Additionally, television shows over the last several decades have increasingly portrayed these issues in more normative and favorable ways. The data would seem to support the notion that these efforts have been consequential for many Americans.

For example, according to the General Social Survey (GSS), in 1988 only 11 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: “Homosexuals should have the right to marry one another.” By 2008, the percentage of Americans agreeing that homosexuals should have the right to marry one another had more than tripled to 38 percent. Further, the GSS has asked the following question for almost four decades: “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex?” In 1973, 76 percent of Americans responded that sexual relations between two adults of the same sex was wrong. In 2008, the percentage of Americans feeling this way had dropped to 53 percent.

Second, it is also possible that religion has had something to do with the apparent generation gap when it comes to the issue of support for same-sex marriage. Most American denominations and church teachings do not condone the practice of homosexuality, and most certainly do not support gay marriage. However, we also know from decades of survey research that the young tend to be less religious than the elderly. Research consistently confirms that the elderly are much more likely than the young to attend religious services and report that religion is important in their lives. Simply put, senior citizens exhibit higher levels of religiosity than Millennials. It stands to reason, therefore, that since the elderly are more religious, they are less likely than the young to favor same-sex marriage. However, should we not also expect Millennials and seniors to differ likewise on other questions regarding homosexuals? As demonstrated earlier, Millennials and seniors hold rather similar views on a number of questions regarding homosexuality.

We also know from the research literature that consistent differences exist between people based on their particular religious tradition or affiliation. For example, Evangelicals tend to be more conservative than mainline Protestants and other religious groups on a host of moral and political issues. Consequently, I examined views on gay marriage among Evangelicals and found a far different picture when comparing Millennials to senior citizens. According to the 2010 GSS, only 38 percent of Evangelical Millennials support gay marriage. Among all other Millennials in the GSS, 72 percent support gay marriage. Turning to Evangelical seniors, we find that only 25 percent support gay marriage, compared to 40 percent among all other seniors. In sum, young Evangelicals are more likely to support same-sex marriage than Evangelical seniors (38 percent and 25 percent respectively), but the difference is nothing close to the 2-to-1 split found in the general population.

There is indeed a significant gap in support of same-sex marriage when one compares all Millennials to all senior citizens. However, when one looks at the views of Evangelicals toward same-sex marriage—a group estimated to be 100 million strong—a considerably different picture emerges. Being an Evangelical Protestant significantly lowers the chance one will agree with gay marriage in either age range, and brings the 18-to-29 age group down to a level of support similar to all others in the 65-and-over age range. Perhaps Evangelical churches are doing a better job combating the considerable cultural influences in support of same-sex marriage.

It is unwarranted and irresponsible to interpret opposition to same-sex marriage as a proxy for being anti-gay. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that senior citizens are anti-gay.

Byron R. Johnson is Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University and author of More God, Less Crime: Why Faith Matters and How It Could Matter More (2011).

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1. The ultimate question about the recognition of same-sex marriage is for the whole society to decide, not for judges on putatively “constitutional” grounds. It is a “constitutional” question in quite another sense—that is, it is a constitutive question, about an institution and a relationship that is pre-political, foundational of society itself, and even more basic than our constitutions or political institutions. Therefore the question should always be referred to the people themselves at the polls—and not decided by their legislators, let alone by judges.

2. In deciding the basic question, people should ask themselves, what is marriage? For it is a thing with a nature, and a purpose. Marriage has always been understood, throughout human history, as a comprehensive union of a man and a woman, grounded in their complementary natures—a couple of the kind that is capable of generating offspring, and being father and mother to them. The law of marriage has always fostered and protected this singular kind of relationship that is capable of natural parentage, and the only relationship fully capable of parentage of any kind, if “fathering” and “mothering” are understood as distinctive contributions. Were it not for the fact that the sexual union of men and women regularly produces children, marriage would not exist at all. Its existence and its character are in accord with the nature of that union.

3. Same-sex marriage advocates have so far been unable to give an answer to the question “What is marriage?” that does not result in the complete collapse of all shape and form to the institution. That is to say, if men can marry men, and women marry women, we no longer know what the institution is, or what it is for, or what its boundaries are, or who is to be ruled in and who is to be ruled out as eligible to participate in it. Polygamy is back; polyamory is in; even incestuous relations are impossible to condemn. This is not a slippery-slope argument. It is the observation of an explosion bursting a levee with a wall of water behind it.

4. Such a change to the institution of marriage does indeed affect everyone. Our society has already done great damage to the institution of marriage thanks to easy divorce; thanks to abortion, contraception, and a widespread moral relativism about relations between the sexes; and thanks to social policies that make fatherhood optional when children come along. Marriage needs shoring up, not a “redefinition” that is actually a destruction.

5. Some advocates of same-sex marriage are “marriage abolitionists,” who see the ultimate goal as a legal order that has no category called “marriage,” and same-sex marriage as a way station on that road. They at least know where they are going. But it is not a destination we should seek. Marriage between men and women makes families, and it is right and proper for the law to foster and protect it.

6. A common argument in favor of same-sex marriage is that laws against it are just like the old Jim Crow laws against interracial marriage. In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down such laws, calling the right to marry a “fundamental freedom.” But those laws interfered with marriage by introducing an irrelevant ingredient—race—as though it were a necessary one. That is, those laws used state power to redefine marriage, a natural institution, for artificial purposes. Now, it is the advocates of same-sex marriage who wish to use state power to redefine marriage, to make the word mean something new and thus change its nature, by removing its central ingredient, the coming together of a man and a woman to make a family.

7. That 1967 decision of the Supreme Court was universally accepted, practically without a peep of protest, because every decent person would have been ashamed to argue that blacks and whites cannot marry. No denunciations of the decision came from any pulpits. It will not be so if same-sex marriage is nationalized by the Supreme Court. It will be Roe v. Wade all over again. Every growing, thriving, and theologically flourishing religious community in America today is part of the movement to defend the historic understanding of marriage, and they won’t be surrendering their principles. Their theologies may differ, but they share a common moral reasoning about the nature of marriage. And the defense of marriage can hardly be called an “establishment of religion” when it is agreed to by evangelical Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians, and Mormons, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews alike.

8. These diverse believers also share a quite reasonable fear that in a country that has adopted same-sex marriage, their religious liberty is threatened. For believing what their traditions have always believed, they will be condemned as bigots, and subject to discriminations and pressures. Religious dissenters from the new dispensation, in many tens of millions, will be second-class citizens, and will be chased out of many professions and avenues of business if they will not abandon what their faiths teach them about marriage. Their hospitals, schools, and charitable organizations will be pressured to drop their religious scruples, and to silence their moral witness.

So, I concluded, the destruction of marriage as an institution, its replacement by we-know-not-what, and a mortal blow struck at the religious freedom that our country has always prized, are prices too high to pay for this revolution in the law of marriage. The American people know this, and that’s why they’ve gone to the polls and defended marriage every time they’ve been asked. We should keep asking them, I said.

One of the other speakers on the program was Hayley Gorenberg, an attorney with Lambda Legal, which actively litigates on behalf of same-sex marriage. Ms. Gorenberg spoke before I did, and in her prepared remarks said the following about the alleged injustice of “walling people out of central rights”:

The first [same-sex] marriage cases, if you look them up in law school textbooks, they’re short, they are settled in a matter of a couple of sentences, and you have judges saying things like “well, I looked in the dictionary, and this is what it said marriage was.” We’ve moved a long way from then. We have further to go. . . .

In terms of what the government may say about whether gay people can have their full rights, there is a core, very-easy-to-understand question about who’s getting hurt here and is anybody getting hurt, by giving people their equality. And the fact is, that nobody else’s marriage is going to be hurt or has been hurt by gay people having their equal rights to protect their families as others want to be protected, to protect their children as others want to protect their children. Tradition is not enough to sustain discrimination. Never has been, never should be, under the Constitution. It wasn’t enough to sustain discrimination in marriage based on race, it wasn’t enough to sustain discrimination in marriage that said women should be property, even though all of these things were traditional. Tradition falls when we truly engage with these factors and ask ourselves the question.

In the Q & A that followed prepared remarks by the seven speakers, I reiterated my third point above, that when marriage is destroyed and rebuilt in order to accommodate same-sex couples, there is no principled basis on which to limit marriage to couples. Particularly if the change comes about in courts of law, which prize consistent reasoning by analogy, the precedent of same-sex marriage will mandate, by parity of reasoning, the legalization of polygamy, polyandry, and polyamory.

Following this repetition of my argument, Gorenberg responded as follows:

With regard to the slippery slope, that’s the burgeoning [sic] of the dam, or you know, whatever it might be, if we draw out our metaphors about what it would mean to let same-sex couples marry, should they choose to, these rankings of incest and polygamy and where does it stop?—well, where it stops is when you actually look at the governmental definition of marriage, you know, as it’s laid out.

It is a binary institution, okay, it’s a two-person institution, which means that our marriage laws are drawn up to talk about all kinds of substitute decision-making, custodial choice, that kind of thing, so that if, for instance, there’s a couple that are married, and one of them dies, who gets custody of the children? Generally, you know, it’s the other person in the marriage. If there is somebody who dies intestate, and they don’t have a will, what happens? You know, you look to the other person in the marriage. If somebody’s incapacitated and decision-making needs to happen in the hospital, you look to the spouse. If there were seventeen spouses, that would be entirely unclear. That’s not how our marriage laws are drawn up. They’re drawn up, it’s a binary institution. Something else like polygamy is something else. So when we’re talking about something like entrance into marriage on an equal footing, we’re talking about entry into a binary institution, and a whole raft of laws that feed into marriage recognize that that is the case.

The attentive reader will already have noticed Gorenberg’s self-contradiction. Alas, time ran out in our brief program at Rutgers before I could regain the floor and point it out to her.

She had begun, in her prepared remarks, by calling on a standard of “rights” that cannot be defeated by appeals to “tradition.” And she had mocked judges who, in the early decisions on the case for same-sex marriage, had simply turned to a dictionary definition of marriage.

Yet, in her response to my point about plural marriages, Gorenberg herself turned immediately to tradition and to received definitions. Marriage just is a “binary institution,” she asserted, and changing that fact would entail all sorts of inconveniences. (The historic existence of polygamy in many places is proof that these inconveniences are not insurmountable, but this did not slow her down.)

Why mere tradition was now owed such automatic allegiance, she did not pause to explain. Now the prospect of altering a “whole raft of laws” associated with marriage filled her with horror and incredulity. She seemed quite oblivious of the fact that she was making my argument for me. Where was her concern about changing all the details and complexities of a forest of family law planted thick with assumptions about husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, always of opposite sexes?

In her nimble way, having shed the drag-chute of principled consistency, Hayley Gorenberg demonstrated the great strength of the movement for same-sex marriage. She did not have anything to offer in answer to the questions “What is marriage? What is it for? What are its boundaries? Whom should it include?” She does not need answers to such questions. All she needs is an argument for the moment, for the cause, for the victory she wants right now. If her argument is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, that is not her concern. The cause is self-justifying.

With the institution of marriage and the future of the family on the line, the rest of us don’t have that luxury. And perhaps the race will not go to the nimble, but to the slow and steady.

Matthew J. Franck is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute.

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Yet it is making some headway. To understand this, is it necessary to grasp how myriad family law developments over the last forty to fifty years have ignored or minimized children’s interests, thus paving the way for the arguments same-sex marriage proponents advance today. For example, as against the idea that marriage and child well-being go together, state laws approving no-fault divorce and normalizing cohabitation (by enforcing cohabitation agreements) do not take children’s presence in a household into consideration at all. Rather, they allow more and more children to be reared outside of households containing their married, biological parents. They also expose more children to instability in living arrangements, and to stepparents and new boyfriends, each of which is, on average, correlated with increased risks to children’s safety and to their emotional and educational achievement.

Against the notion that marriage is the place where society is born and formed, federal constitutional law concerning birth control and abortion from the 1970s through the 1990s stridently instructed us that decisions about procreation are about the individual, not the married couple and not the child. In the 1972 “birth control for singles” case, Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Court bluntly opined that “the marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup. If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” In the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey abortion decision, the Court went even further, declaring that the liberty interest in deciding to abort one’s own child is, at its core, a matter of “defin[ing] one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”

Finally, against the idea that parental rights are derivative of parental duties to children, there are not only the counter-examples of no-fault divorce laws and the legal right to abortion, but also the fact that neither state nor federal law meaningfully regulates adults’ access to assisted reproductive technologies, including to donor gametes, deferring completely to adult desires for children versus children’s need to know and be loved by their own mother and father.

A look at the legislative transcripts or the judicial opinions or other sources that brought each of these legal regimes into being indicates how little children’s fates were considered from the very start. The legislative hearings leading to no-fault divorce, for example, are replete with references to children’s resiliency, or how the facilitating of their parents’ wishes for a divorce will indirectly lead to children’s happiness.[1] The California Supreme Court opinion that started the ball rolling toward many states’ recognizing and enforcing cohabitation agreements (Marvin v. Marvin, 1976) paid no attention to the possible effects upon children of the greater normalization of cohabitation. Some of the most popular assisted-reproductive technologies were not even tested on animals before being used to create thousands upon thousands of human children. And of course, nothing could have been further from the minds of the judges who gave us Roe and Casey than the well-being of the child on the other end of the abortion instruments.

Given this history, it should surprise no one that in the most recent family law controversy implicating children’s well-being, same-sex marriage proponents have devoted so little attention to the question of children. It shouldn’t surprise us when the Iowa Supreme Court relegates to a footnote its assurances that children will do just as well with a father or a mother as without one (Varnum v. Brien, 2009), or when that California district court opinion in the Proposition 8 case (Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 2010) concludes that opposite-sex marriage is merely an “artifact” of pernicious sex-role discrimination within marriage and society, a discrimination that is now passé. It should sound perfectly mainstream when members of the Massachusetts legislature (before refusing to allow citizens the right to vote on same-sex marriage) called marriage a “right” that “individuals” have, a matter allowing people to love one another, or of “guarantee[ing] the greatest amount of happiness to the most people.”[2]

Are these conclusions about marriage the inevitable follow-up to lawmakers’ recent dissociating of marriage and child-rearing? What about the vastly different concerns featured in over a century of Supreme Court opinions linking the state’s interest in marriage to children and their formation? There are several possible responses. Technically speaking, of course, the Court’s decisions from Reynolds to Lehr have not been overturned; they remain good law. But proponents of same-sex marriage could argue that the language in these cases linking marriage with parenting is dicta—i.e., not essential to their holdings—or even merely historically conditioned expressions of a moral sensibility bearing no relation to our current age. Maybe. Maybe today’s Supreme Court would accede to such a characterization. After all, look at its opinion (albeit over a stinging dissent) in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) granting constitutional status to sodomy, in response to perceived current trends here and abroad.

In light of the mode of reasoning adopted in Lawrence, then, those loath to see marriage and children divorced from one another would be wise to adopt an additional strategy. They should argue that the Supreme Court was more right than it even knew during the past two centuries, when it identified the state’s interest in marriage as children and their formation. In fact, today, more than ever before, we have a substantial body of literature linking children’s—and communities’—flourishing with the stable presence within a family of married, biological parents. Two additional developments also argue for reappropriating and reinvigorating Supreme Court precedents on marriage, rather than moving in the direction suggested by the last few decades’ retreat from child-centered marriage.

First, the most vulnerable members of society appear to be paying the highest price for this retreat. African Americans, Hispanics (our newest large immigrant group), the poor, and the less educated are suffering the most notable financial, emotional, and educational fallout. They now marry less, cohabit more, bear more children out of wedlock, and divorce more often than more privileged citizens, with the result that their children, and perhaps even their grandchildren, risk becoming part of an entrenched underclass in American society. To allow this to continue is to risk the rise of the perception that Americans are different from one another at very basic levels—in our fundamental needs for permanent and faithful love, for support when we are very young or very old, for harmony between the sexes and the generations. This is a very dangerous kind of separation between fellow citizens and human beings.

Second, it should be pointed out that the family law developments of the last forty to fifty years, described above, often proceeded on the claim that children would ultimately benefit from each of them. In other words, even those who were busy effectively dismantling family law’s orientation to children’s well-being were not deaf to the tradition embodied in the Supreme Court’s marriage and procreation cases. Rather, they argued that children would be happier when their parents were happier—because their parents were getting a divorce, or cohabiting, or living in whatever arrangement they chose. They argued that children would be happier if “wanted,” and what could be more wanted than a very planned, well-timed child, or even a “designed” child? They argued that cohabitation should lead to more stable marriages.

Now that each of these claims has been disproved, or at least called into serious question by respected research, there are proposals—for the first time in a very long time—to reform various family laws in order once again to take account of children. More scholars are proposing and more states are considering requiring sperm donors to provide information allowing their biological children to find out more about them. There are active efforts to promote legislation to slow down the divorce process, especially for parents of minor children. Scholarship about the dangers posed to children by cohabitation is gaining a national audience. In short, current reform efforts provide an additional reason to refuse to deem the last half-century of family law “progress,” let alone to take their “adults-first” or “adults-only” rallying cry any further, to its logical conclusion in same-sex marriage.

Helen Alvaré is associate professor at George Mason University School of Law and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. This is the second in a two-part series. Read the first installment here.

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[2] See, supra, Helen M. Alvaré, “The Turn Toward the Self in the Law of Marriage,” 174-176 and notes therein.

Those who champion marriage between a man and a woman would like to see the Supreme Court settle the matter according to a long series of precedents treating procreation and child-rearing as primary state-recognized goods of marriage. But given that one ought to be realistic about judicial willingness today to ignore precedent in favor of some perceived zeitgeist, an additional strategy to preserve the link between marriage and children in the Court’s reasoning is warranted.

This strategy would show, first, how the path of divorcing marriage from children—a path taken to its logical end by same-sex marriage—not only disadvantages children, but is already helping to effect troubling social divisions between the more and less privileged in the United States. The persistence of such divisions could begin to suggest, falsely, that the well-off and the poor, the more educated and the less educated, the majority and various minorities, do not share the same fundamental nature where marriage and parenting are concerned. Second, such a strategy would highlight the relatively recent willingness among scholars and lawmakers to come to grips with the fallout of “disestablishing” the interrelated goods of marriage and effective parenting, and to begin proposing reforms. This is not the time, therefore, to ignore or deny the robust empirical foundations of such reform efforts, via legally redefining “marriage” to exclude its intrinsic orientation to children. A brief look at our Supreme Court’s longstanding positions on the meaning of marriage (in this first of a two-part series), followed by a look at the whirlwind of family law developments from the 1970s to today (in the second part), will suffice to sketch the argument I am proposing.

A preliminary note: It is important to understand that family law is made in large part at the state level and, regarding marriage, consists not in lengthy disquisitions on the meaning of marriage, but rather in brief lists of the necessary preconditions for entering into it. States’ lists are similar. To enter marriage, there must be two persons: of opposite sexes (in the vast majority of states), of sufficient age, not related within prohibited degrees of consanguinity, free to marry, capable of marital consent, etc. On the one hand, state laws conditioning entry into marriage are fairly laissez-faire. On the other hand, all states signal the importance of marriage by refusing to acknowledge purely “private contracts” to marry. Rather, the state imposes terms upon marrying couples—a set of mutual rights and obligations with which they are not even likely familiar. Even when couples make prenuptial agreements, the state constrains their contents in the interests of fairness to the adults and solicitude for children.

The federal government tends to “make family law” when it feels threatened by developments in the states. Increasing rates of nonmarital births in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, and the resulting astronomical federal welfare expenditures, led to a series of federal child support laws, programs about preventing premarital sex and pregnancy, and later initiatives encouraging stable marriage and fatherhood. The latter, in particular, were grounded upon the growing body of data linking marriage with child well-being. The Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s sprang from fears that one state’s approval of same-sex marriage would lead to demands for interstate and federal same-sex marriage recognition. For the most part, however, federal “characterizations” of the meaning and importance of marriage appear most often in a long series of Supreme Court cases concerning the constitutionality of various state laws affecting marriage or parent-child relationships. While a complete history of these rulings is not possible here, I will characterize their leading messages.

The first message, and the most plain, coming from the Supreme Court concerns the relationship between marriage and the birth of children. While it is impossible to disentangle completely this state interest from its interest in the healthy formation of children within marriage, still it is possible to discern it. In a late nineteenth-century case refusing to recognize a First Amendment right to practice polygamy, for example, the Court wrote that: “Upon [marriage] society may be said to be built” (Reynolds v. United States). Nearly 100 years later, in a case striking down a law banning interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia), the Court referred to marriage as “one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.”

In several cases from the late nineteenth century to 1967, the Supreme Court revealed in a different fashion its understanding of the link between marriage and children: in cases where only a right to marry was at stake, or only a right respecting childrearing, the Court would nevertheless speak of the two interests as a pair. The plaintiffs in Loving asserted a right to marry as against antimiscegenation laws, and still the Court referred to marriage as necessary for “our very existence and survival.” Skinner v. Oklahoma concerned a law punishing certain felons with forced sterilization, but the opinion spoke of “marriage and procreation” as basic rights. In Meyer v. Nebraska, the case vindicating parents’ constitutional right to instruct their children in a foreign language, the Court referred to citizens’ rights “to marry, establish a home and bring up children.”

The state’s interest in linking procreation with marriage is also shown by the history of laws discouraging sexual intimacy and procreation between the unmarried, while protecting it between the married. Today, laws punishing adultery, fornication, or cohabitation rarely exist or are enforced. Still, even in the 1965 Supreme Court decision granting married persons the constitutional right to access birth control, a concurring opinion could observe: “It should be said of the Court’s holding today that it in no way interferes with a State’s proper regulation of sexual promiscuity or misconduct. . . . But the intimacy of husband and wife is necessarily an essential and accepted feature of the institution of marriage, an institution which the State not only must allow, but which always and in every age it has fostered and protected” (Griswold v. Connecticut).

A second prominent theme in the Supreme Court’s marriage jurisprudence is the importance of the marital family for forming and educating the citizens necessary for the continuation of our democratic society. In the 1879 polygamy opinion Reynolds, for example, the Supreme Court opined:

For certainly no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth, … than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guaranty of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement.

The Reynolds case also contains a less frequently noted observation linking the shape of marriage and the shape of society: “According as monogamous or polygamous marriages are allowed, do we find the principles on which the government of the people, to a greater or less extent, rests. … Polygamy leads to the patriarchal principle, and, when applied to large communities, fetters the people in stationary despotism, while that principle cannot long exist in connection with monogamy.”

In 1943, in Prince v. Massachusetts, the Court not only affirmed parents’ authority over their children within reasonable limits (here, obedience to labor laws), but more importantly for our purposes, characterized their authority as a function of their responsibilities to children and to society, writing: “A democratic society rests, for its continuance, upon the healthy well-rounded growth of young people into full maturity as citizens, with all that implies.” An even more pointed expression of the economy of adults’ rights respecting children appeared in the case vindicating parents’ constitutional right to educate their children in religious schools. Nearly echoing John Locke’s observation in his Second Treatise on Government—“The Power, then, that Parents have over their Children, arises from that Duty which is incumbent on them, to take care of their Offspring”—the Supreme Court wrote in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that “The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

As recently as 1983, in the single father’s rights case Lehr v. Robertson, the Court even more explicitly stated that “the Court has emphasized the paramount interest in the welfare of children and has noted that the rights of the parents are a counterpart of the responsibilities they have assumed.” It furthermore linked marriage and marital parenting with facilitating citizens’ ability to self-govern. Refusing to treat a single father identically to a married father in terms of rights respecting the child, it wrote that “marriage has played a critical role … in developing the decentralized structure of our democratic society. In recognition of that role, and as part of their general overarching concern for serving the best interests of children, state laws almost universally express an appropriate preference for the formal family.”

In sum, our Supreme Court has time and time again, and in an axiomatic fashion, expressed the state’s interests in marriage as: children, their formation, and the building up of a society of citizens well-prepared for self-government. In the process of recognizing various rights claimed by parents respecting their children, the Court has further observed that to the extent parents have such rights, it is because they have duties toward children. Those who demand that the state recognize, as marriage, partnerships of two persons of the same sex, ignore or deny the long line of Supreme Court decisions affirming the links between the state’s interests in marriage and child-welfare and social health. Their insistence, however, that marriage is about the individual self, seeking satisfaction respecting matters related to sex, romance, and parenting, is not new to family law. Same-sex marriage proponents are only the most recent in a long line of voices urging American society to divorce children from marriage, and to vault adults’ interests over children’s needs. The second part of this article will treat this trajectory in family law.

Helen Alvaré is associate professor at George Mason University School of Law and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. This is the first in a two-part series. Read the second installment here.

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The Second Chances Act is a brilliant piece of work by two of the nation’s leading pro-marriage liberals. (Full disclosure: The authors kindly give me far more credit than I am due by including me in a list of people to be thanked for “contributions,” which in my case consisted of attending one meeting in which an early draft of the report and the legislation was presented.)

The Second Chances Act proposes new model legislation that includes a one-year waiting period for divorce, along with a requirement that parents of minor children considering divorce take a short online divorced parenting education course, which would include information on reconciliation. Spouses could trigger the one-year waiting period without actually filing for divorce by sending their mates a formal letter of notice. These requirements would be waived in cases of domestic violence.

Now, some might ask, “Unnecessary divorce? What’s that?”

The genesis of the Second Chances Act was Minnesota Judge Bruce Peterson’s observation that at least some of the people he was seeing in his court looked like they needed a “rest stop” on the “divorce superhighway.” “When Judge Peterson looked at his own court system, widely acknowledged as a progressive one,” Sears and Doherty write, “he saw attempts to meet nearly every need of divorcing couples—legal and financial assistance, protection orders, parenting education, and more—except for reconciliation.”

The assumption of the entire legal system is that by the time a person files for divorce, the marriage is already dead. Amazingly, no one really even asked how many people filing for divorce would be interested in reconciliation.

So Doherty teamed up with colleagues to do some groundbreaking and original research, testing that assumption.

What they found shocked the family law community: “New research shows that about 40 percent of U.S. couples already well into the divorce process say that one or both of them are interested in the possibility of reconciliation.” In about 10 percent of divorces, both the husband and the wife are interested in reconciliation (likely unbeknownst to either of them).

“This finding is stunning,” Sears and Doherty point out. “It tells us that we have a major new opportunity to help millions of American families. . . . The research findings presented in this report clearly suggest that today’s very high U.S. divorce rate is not only costly to taxpayers, it is not only harmful to children, it is also, to a degree that we are only now understanding, preventable.”

How do we know that a divorce is unnecessary? Let’s put it this way: If a divorce can be prevented by creating a one-year waiting period and giving both spouses information on reconciliation, then it certainly is an unnecessary divorce. And according to recent studies, there are many divorces that could have been prevented in just this way.

In a well-controlled study, economist Leora Friedberg found that states with longer waiting periods have had smaller increases in divorce rates than states that have shorter or no separation requirements. Indeed, a 2009 study on Western Europe by Thorsten Kneip and Gerrit Bauer, “Does Unilateral Divorce Raise the Divorce Rate,” found that 80 percent of the increase in divorce rates between 1970 and 1990 could be attributed to eliminating or shortening waiting periods.

The scientific case for the impact of waiting periods in reducing divorce is not bullet-proof, these scholars acknowledge. But Doherty and Sears suggest that a one-year waiting period, combined with a parenting education class that puts interested couples in touch with reconciliation resources, should have an even bigger impact than waiting periods alone.

At the root of this discussion, however, is the larger question: Why should we try to reduce unnecessary divorce at all?

First, unnecessary divorce hurts children. Doherty and Sears sum up the social science evidence:

We now know that divorce on average has dramatic effects on children’s lives, across the life course. Research shows that divorced fathers and mothers are less likely to have high-quality relationships with their children. Children with divorced or unmarried parents are more likely to be poor, while married couples on average build more wealth than those who are not married, even accounting for the observation that well-off people are more likely to get married. Parental divorce or failure to marry appears to increase children’s risk of failure in school. Such children are less likely to finish high school, complete college, or attain high-status jobs. Infant mortality is higher among children whose parents do not get or stay married, and such children on average have poorer physical health compared to their peers with married parents. Teens from divorced families are more likely to abuse drugs or alcohol, get in trouble with the law, and experience a teen pregnancy. Numerous studies also document that children living in homes with unrelated men are at much higher risk of childhood physical or sexual abuse.

These studies generally adjust for parental education and income, which means that the negative effects cannot be explained by these demographic factors.

Second, the majority of people who divorce do not go on to make a happier marriage. If they re-marry, they re-divorce, putting themselves (and their kids) on a relationship merry-go-round.

Third, divorce costs taxpayers money. A 2008 study by economist Ben Scafidi, “The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing,” estimated that family fragmentation costs the taxpayers at least $112 billion each and every year

What’s the payoff for America’s children?

Doherty and Sears say that rolling family fragmentation back to the levels of 1980 would result in “half a million fewer children suspended from school, about 200,000 fewer children engaging in delinquency or violence, a quarter of a million fewer children receiving therapy, about a quarter of a million fewer smokers, about 80,000 fewer children thinking about suicide, and about 28,000 fewer children attempting suicide.”

28,000 fewer children attempting suicide? Now that’s a second chance worth taking.

Maggie Gallagher is a co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage and host of The Maggie Report (www.maggiereport.com).

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The odd thing about “progressive” tropes is their peculiar, static, timeless quality.

For progressives, time stands still. Each new generation is posed as poised to break through taboos that, in truth, vanished long ago.

The modern youngish woman like Kate (mateless and childless at 39 years of age) must find a way to view her sexual predicament as a social breakthrough, a revolutionary act, an act of liberation from her mother’s restricted and restrictive norms.

“In 1969, when my 25-year-old mother, a college-educated high school teacher, married a handsome lawyer-to-be, most women her age were doing more or less the same thing. . . . She’d never had sex with anyone but my father. Could she have even envisioned herself on a shopping excursion with an ex-lover, never mind one who was getting married while she remained alone?” Kate wonders.

Kate is probably the very last generation of (not very) young women who can even imagine themselves re-enacting this fantasy of sex as liberation. She is the very last generation of women whose mothers married young in a world that frowned on premarital sex, had children with husbands and—because any actual marriage is finite and human longing is infinite—fantasized a better, bigger life and marriage for their daughters than the humdrum reality of married love.

I know. At 51, I’m about a decade older than Kate. My son is just a decade younger.

The next generation of Atlantic cover girls on marriage will have mothers who had too much sex before marriage, and perhaps even afterward, who came of age in a society that celebrated casual sex, divorce, unwed-motherhood, abortion.

Your mother’s been there, done that.

Of course, that will not stop the “progressive” young women from trying to find some way their ongoing sexual perplexities represent a revolutionary advance for women.

But because Kate is an honest woman, her essay reads like a dreary slog through the gap between myth and reality of the sexual revolution.

Kate goes back to speak to younger women today, and is appalled by what she finds among 20-somethings:

Most of them said that though they’d had a lot of sex, none of it was particularly sensual or exciting. It appears the erotic promises of the 1960s sexual revolution have run aground on the shoals of changing sex ratios, where young women and men come together in fumbling, drunken couplings fueled less by lust than by a vague sense of social conformity.

What caused the “de-eroticization of sex,” she wonders.

Who exactly are the new enemies of Eros?

Sex has been divorced from meaning. Men are not being raised to be good family men, and women are not being raised to appreciate good family men. And men are failing to become the kind of men women want. Porn is available for all as a substitute for life.

So Kate, facing a future without children or marriage, wants to celebrate singleness and to kill her youthful idealization.

“Everywhere I turn, I see couples upending existing norms and power structures,” she says, citing a friend who fell in love with her dog walker, a man 12 years younger, with whom she stayed for three years “and are best friends today.”

Well, everywhere I turn in Kate’s essay I see women doing the best they can to celebrate the best they feel they can get, and it’s unbearably sad.

The truth is celebrating singleness—i.e., celebrating “not doing something”—makes no sense. Loving is better than not loving. Choosing to love and commit to a husband or a child is a much higher ideal than choosing not to; that’s why it needs to be celebrated and idealized.

Of course, not everyone marries or becomes a mother, and of course every human life has other possibilities for meaning, and other forms of love to give.

But all of these other loves—the aunt, the grandparent, the best friend—came into being because somewhere some woman gave herself to the independence-shattering act of making a family.

The decline of manhood and norms around sex, marriage, and family produces for young women what may in fact have to be endured—but celebrated? Not after reading Kate’s essay.

Maggie Gallagher is a co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage and host of The Maggie Report (www.maggiereport.com).

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Ms. A might argue, for example, that the legalization of abortion does not harm her. Of course millions of other people have had abortions, and most never would have considered one had it not been legal. A large percentage of these women have been coerced into abortion by parents or boyfriends. And there is, obviously, the harm suffered by the children actually aborted. But Ms. A has neither had an abortion, nor been aborted by her mother, and so believes she has suffered no harm.

Similarly, Mr. B argues that he is not harmed by no-fault divorce. Of course divorce has gone from a rare proceeding, used under extreme conditions, to a commonplace social practice that ends nearly half of all marriages. Perhaps we could argue that these people, and their children, have been harmed. But Mr. B is still happily married after all these years, so he believes he has suffered no harm.

Finally, Ms. A or Mr. B will turn to you and ask how X will harm you personally. If you cannot come up with an answer, your support of X is expected.

The most common way to answer this question is to concede that X will not harm me personally, but to appeal to other considerations against X—based on the nature of human persons, ethical principles, the nature of law and society, and the overall institutional degradation that will follow the enactment of the policies in question. In this essay, however, I want to concentrate on the claim that such public policies do not harm me personally.

First, such a claim is self-serving. It only considers the harm done to me, while discounting as irrelevant the harm done to millions of other human lives; and the evidence of the harm caused to so many people by these two legalized atrocities is incontrovertible.

Second, such a claim is self-congratulatory. It assumes that when the change happens, harm may happen to other people, but it certainly will not happen to me. One therefore views oneself as superior to others, above the harm these practices cause.

Third, such a claim conveniently accounts for only that kind of harm that the arguer is thinking about at the moment, such as serious and obvious physical or psychological harm, while passing over less serious but no less real harms, and discounting the reality of moral and social harm.

Fourth, such a claim juxtaposes “no harm at all” with “irreparable damage” as the only two outcomes in a situation where one might be harmed. There are other possible states of affairs. One can be harmed, but choose to accept it for the sake of some other good. One can be harmed without realizing it. One can also be harmed, yet survive or even recover.

A harm is, at minimum, a kind of loss. Not every loss is a harm. It is best to save the term “harm” for those situations in which I lose something that belongs properly to me, something fitting to me without which I cannot flourish as well. I have a responsibility to protect such things. Others have a basic responsibility to refrain from taking these things from me, and occasionally, they have a responsibility to supply them to me.

We have been personally harmed by the regimes of abortion and easy divorce. We might not realize it; we might have survived it; we might choose to ignore it; we might even have recovered. But we have all been harmed.

How many men have lost children they never knew existed? How many women, having given in to the temptation to abort in a crisis simply because the possibility was there, easily accessible, and legal, now suffer for that choice? How many men and women, who otherwise might never have imagined the option had it been illegal, at least seriously considered the idea? Such temptations, seriously pondered, are damaging to us. Even if we refuse the temptation, there remains the shame of having proposed it; we may recover, but we have sustained damage. And the children who know that they were just fortunate not to have parents who destroyed their own children (or worse, that they just happened to be the children their parents did not destroy) live every day with the knowledge that their existence depends on the whim of those in power.

How many husbands and wives, having declared their love and fidelity until death, find themselves seriously tempted just to walk away from their marriage when bumps arise on their road to bliss? How many suspect that their spouses just might walk if things do not go their way? How many fear at the first major conflict that it might be the end of their marriage, rather than, well, just a fight? How many children live in fear when their parents argue, not because their parents indicate that they will divorce, but because so many of their schoolmates come from broken homes—and because the authorities in their lives, fearing to cause pain to children from broken families, insist that a family is whatever people say it is?

When the social structures have changed such that we all live in fear and suspicion that those we most love and who claim to most love us may abandon us or even destroy us, we are all damaged. This is true of a society where abortion is permissible and encouraged for women in desperate or inconvenient situations for bearing a child. It is also true of a society where no-fault divorce is a readily available path for troubled couples.

The knowledge that abortion and no-fault divorce are part of our culture makes my job as a husband and a father harder than it should be. It takes years of work to overcome the fears and suspicions that grow when these two evils are legally permitted choices. My family and I have suffered damage. We may not have suffered the damage of those who practiced abortion or underwent a divorce; we may have recovered. But the damage was nonetheless real. It is too important to pretend it did not happen.

Who has harmed us? I propose that it is the society of which we are members, through its government and laws. These are hard words that require justification.

Human beings are both rational and social creatures. We live not in herds but in ordered societies. We do this because it is good for us: the order of society that is necessary for us to live well is preserved by government and laws. If our government and laws do not help us to flourish (or if they actually assault our well-being), it is impossible to justify living under that government or those laws.

If government exists to support us in our flourishing, then it is obligated, in the deepest sense, to function in accordance with the truth of what is fitting for us. It is obligated to try to protect us from harm, and to support us in what is good for us. A society that, through its government, turns a blind eye when the human rights of its citizens are violated—when its homeless are robbed, its gay men are assaulted, its young women raped—is a society that is failing to do its job. A people who, through its government, declares by law that it is permissible to do these things to the people it is bound to protect, on the other hand, is a government that has turned on some of its people in favor of other, more powerful people.

The cause du jour, the primary contest over human flourishing, is the debate over the meaning of marriage.

The truth of marriage is that it can only exist between one man and one woman, for the sake of the children who may come as a result of their sexual union. Thus government is obligated to recognize the truth of marriage; to protect and support that project of bringing children into the world and caring for them; to recognize all and only actual marriages; and to discourage sexual acts in other contexts.

Proponents of same-sex marriage might well note here that my argument about the harm I undergo makes sense only if one agrees with my understanding of sex and marriage. This is, of course, true. With a different understanding of marriage, one might argue that same-sex couples are harmed by the lack of marital status because they believe it is owed to them.

The simple fact that no one in the entire history of humanity has ever thought it even possible for two people of the same sex to marry should give us pause. If it does not, then arguments about the nature of marriage should. I have argued previously in Public Discourse that marriage exists only as the union of one man and one woman, declared before the community, because the community has a stake in the outcome of their sexual union, i.e., children. If it were not the case that sex leads naturally (though not in every case) to children, the community would have no interest in the relationship, any more than in any other relationship of friendship or amusement. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine how anyone would have thought up the idea in the first place.

On the other hand, those who support same-sex “marriage” do so with an argument that looks something like this: “Nobody talks that way anymore. Nobody acts that way anymore. Therefore marriage has changed.” They look around at a society that, at least in practice, behaves as if sex and marriage mean nothing more than whatever the people who enter into a relationship want it to mean.

We may note that the conclusion of the above argument does not follow from the premises. The fact that many people think and act differently these days about marriage does not change the nature of marriage, any more than the nature of a cat would change if we decided to treat it like a rosebush.

If marriage is what they say it is, however, then marriage is nothing more than a contract. And if it is merely a contract, then the proper response of government and law is not to legalize same-sex marriage; it is to get out of the marriage business entirely. Law’s function, then, would be merely to help settle disputes between people who claim contracts have been violated. Any harm involved would be entirely a function of the terms of the contract, not the nature or circumstances of the people involved.

If, however, the nature of marriage is what I have argued for here, then two people who are literally incapable of marrying one another are not suffering a harm, or even a loss, when the society refuses to call their relationships a marriage. There is a difference between suffering a loss and simply not getting what one wants.

My wife, my children, and I are harmed when the government turns its back on the truth of marriage, and thus turns its back on its citizens’ flourishing. The government may force me to send my children to schools that mandate the celebration of same-sex relationships, thus violating my rights as a parent. It may prosecute me for hate crimes for the very expression of my views, thus violating my freedom of conscience and speech. I hope not. These harms are not a logically necessary outcome of the recognition of same-sex marriage, so perhaps that threat will dissipate. But the other harms that I have spelled out above are indeed necessary and harmful consequences of the adoption of same-sex marriage. The proper response of society to the widespread abuse of sex and marriage is not to multiply the harm by abandoning the truth. Rather, it is to get back on the right track.


Stephen J. Heaney is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Saint Thomas (St. Paul).

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Presidential candidates for the 2012 election need to know that marriage is not only an essential issue in this race; it is a winning issue.

Elites have sounded the death knell on the marriage debate again and again, but popular support for traditional marriage refuses to die. Americans at the ballot box have repeatedly shocked elite opinion by demonstrating that even in deeply blue states a majority of Americans continues to oppose same-sex marriage.

This May, a poll commissioned by Public Opinions Strategies for the Alliance Defense Fund found that 62 percent of those surveyed agreed with this statement: “I believe marriage should be defined only as a union between one man and one woman.” Fifty-three percent strongly agreed, while just 35 percent disagreed.

Yet recent polling also reflects that Americans in the mushy middle are no longer hearing much about the opposition to same-sex marriage. Their willingness to express support for a traditional understanding of marriage is starting to shift, depending on how the question is posed to them and what other questions surround the polling question.

This shift means something: when the issue is framed as one of fairness or equality, Americans are now reluctant to disagree with gay marriage, but when it is framed as a moral or family issue, they continue to adhere strongly to traditional norms of marriage.

As Ken Blackwell recently put it, marriage is not a wedge issue but a bridge issue, creating strange bedfellow coalitions never before seen in American politics across lines of race, creed, and color.

Nonetheless, the campaign to silence opposition to gay marriage by reframing it as illegitimate hatred or bigotry is effective: those who defend marriage as the union of one man and one woman suffer consequences.

Write a book on marriage, and mainstream corporations will fire you. Ask Frank Turek, who claimed that his contract with Cisco was terminated when a human resources executive found out through Google that he had written a book opposing same-sex marriage.

Appear in an advertisement opposing same-sex marriage, as Maine’s Don Mendell did, and your professional license might be jeopardized or taken away.

Donate to pro-marriage organizations—or simply to a group that supports a candidate who also happens to support marriage—or ask a sitting Congressman who opposes gay marriage to address your business group—and you will meet with threats to your economic interests and your business enterprises from those who do not see same-sex marriage as an issue about which Americans of good will can and do disagree. Instead, you will be charged with failing to realize that same-sex marriage is today’s defining civil rights issue, opposition to which marks you as a bigot outside the American mainstream. Ask, for example, the Wilton Manor Business Association of South Florida, which yielded to boycott threats by retracting their invitation to Rep. Allen West.

Advocates of gay marriage are not slow to use any lever of power, including government, to impose their new morality on America. The primary goal of the existing gay marriage movement is to use cultural, social, economic, and political power to create a new norm: marriage equality. The governing idea behind “marriage equality” is this: there is no difference between same-sex and opposite-sex unions. If you see a difference, there is something wrong with you. “You’re a hater, you’re a bigot, and you need to be fired!” Watch out.

So why is marriage, the one issue that the progressive left is energetically making too radioactive even to address, also the one issue that a candidate committed to American civilization cannot evade, avoid, or downplay?

The first reason is the nature of marriage itself.

Every human society has recognized that there is something special about the union of husband and wife. Amid the spectacular myriad of relationships that human beings create, marriage is unique for a reason: these are the only unions that can create life and connect those new young lives to the mother and father who made them.

For same-sex marriage advocates to make good on their promise of marriage equality, the very idea that children need a mom and dad must be delegitimized, rendered unspeakable in polite company. Same-sex marriage represents an intellectual and moral repudiation of the idea that marriage is grounded in any human reality outside of government, that government is obligated to respect and protect. Marriage is becoming an idea at the mercy of changing fashion, without deep roots in human nature.

And our current marriage culture is in serious trouble. According to a new Brookings Institution report by two major family scholars (Brad Wilcox and Andrew Cherlin), “the sexual disorder that marked the underclass in the sixties has moved up the class ladder well into Middle America.”

The study discovered that by the late 2000s, “moderately educated American women were more than seven times as likely to bear a child outside of marriage as compared with their college-educated peers.” While college-educated mothers showed a six-percent rate of nonmarital births, the rate of nonmarital births for moderately educated mothers was closer to the rate for mothers that do not have high school degrees—44 percent and 54 percent, respectively.

Add to these statistics that 43 percent of moderately educated young adults between ages 25 and 44 report that “marriage has not worked out for most people they know,” while only 17 percent of highly educated young adults report this.

The collapse of our marriage culture has economic costs. The cost to taxpayers of our rising rates of fatherlessness and fragmentation is at least $112 billion each year, as government expands to meet the needs of children in broken families. (For more statistics, see Benjamin Scafidi’s economic analysis, “The Tax Payer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing: First-Ever Estimates for the Nation and All Fifty States.”)

All of these children in fatherless homes are casualties of the deepest idea of the sexual revolution: human institutions that limit sexual desire must be remade in order to achieve “maximum feasible accommodation” with adult sexual desire.

Same-sex marriage will contribute further to the erosion of our marriage culture by making it unacceptable to say that children need married moms and dads. Our goal should not be to strengthen Americans’ commitment to good romances, but to strengthen our commitment to marriage as a social institution dedicated to bringing together male and female so that children have mothers and fathers. In that institution, the government clearly has a stake because it is so vital to the common good.

Far from being a neutral or pro-liberty position, same-sex marriage amounts to a government takeover of an ancient and honorable institution. Here, there are deep similarities philosophically between the abortion and gay marriage movements. At the heart of each movement is the belief that by re-jiggering words, elites change reality itself. A human life can be redefined as a cluster of cells. Marriage can be remade to mean whatever the government decides. Reality itself can be re-mastered to accommodate sexual desires.

But in truth, government cannot create life, and did not create marriage, and government has no business redefining either.

The second thing at stake in the marriage debate is the relationship between Christianity (and Judaism) and the American tradition itself.

The new public norms at the heart of “marriage equality” attempt to deface the Bible by ripping out Genesis and remaking the American tradition, so that public norms are incompatible with orthodox Judeo-Christian beliefs. For the first time in American history, mainstream, orthodox Judeo-Christian beliefs will render an American a second-class citizen, subject to a variety of bars and exclusions government imposes to reduce the reach of “anti-equality” bigotry.

It’s hard to see what conservatives will have left to conserve if we accept this, especially at the most fundamental level (which is the philosophical level, the level on which America is founded and sustained, for we are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated therefore to propositions).

How should a candidate strengthen his or her commitment to upholding marriage? A first step is to sign NOM’s Marriage Pledge, which includes the following five concrete actions:

1. Support and send to the states a federal marriage amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
2. Defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court.
3. Appoint judges and an attorney general who will respect the original meaning of the Constitution.
4. Appoint a presidential commission to investigate harassment of traditional marriage supporters.
5. Support legislation that would return to the people of Washington, D.C., their right to vote for marriage.

Beyond signing the pledge, GOP candidates should also make the steps below part of their platform:

1. Speak for marriage as the union of husband and wife that is unique for a reason: children need mothers and fathers. A good society will acknowledge the need to help children in all family forms, but will aim for a state where children are raised in the most favorable situation: a stable two-biological-parent family.
2. Develop new strategies to protect and expand religious liberty, which is being relentlessly threatened by a newly energized and aggressive progressive elite. A model to follow is Arizona’s new law that protects religious student groups from discrimination at public universities because the groups require adherence to orthodox religious beliefs and practices. Employment discrimination laws may need to be amended to protect traditional marriage supporters. A playing field where the law protects those who enter gay marriages from economic injury, but where defending the content of Genesis can also get you fired, is not fair or level or just.
3. Fund research on marriage, and especially research on interventions to strengthen marriage. Reduce unnecessary divorce and lower the rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancy without undermining parental rights or religious liberty.
4. Use your bully pulpit to promote the Second Chances Act and other reasonable reforms of no-fault divorce.
5. Ask Hollywood to look for ways to help promote marriage. Use the cultural influence of the White House to launch a new generation of artists and storytellers committed to telling the real truth about love and marriage.
6. Foster and reward a new generation of empirical social scientists willing to brave political correctness to investigate the benefits of marriage. The empirical culture wars are won and lost at the level of elites. Use the power of the presidential office not to interfere in science, but to encourage a new generation of scientists that is willing to go fearlessly wherever the data actually leads.

The stubborn common sense of the American public in resisting same-sex marriage, even in the face of the mainstream media’s approval, provides a platform for presidential candidates to seize, and thereby not only resist a radical transformation of the American tradition, but also help build a culture committed to a core American idea: moral truth exists, and our rights (including our right to marriage) are not gifts of government, but are grounded in and bounded by Nature and Nature’s God.

Maggie Gallagher is a co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage and host of The Maggie Report (www.maggiereport.com). This essay is part of the 2012 Election Symposium. Read all of the entries here:

• Ryan T. Anderson, “Liberty, Justice, and the Common Good:
  Political Principles for 2012 and Beyond”
   
• O. Carter Snead, “Protect the Weak and Vulnerable:
  The Primacy of the Life Issue”
• Maggie Gallagher, “Defend Marriage: Moms and Dads Matter”
• Samuel Gregg, “Fix America’s Economy:
  Two Principles for Reform”
• Ed Whelan, “Defend Our Laws: Justice Matters”
• Helen Alvaré, “Uphold Conscience Protection:
  Religious Freedom’s Contribution to the American
  Experience and Threats to its Survival”
   
• Jennifer Bryson, “Promote Democracy:
  Start at Home but Don’t Stay at Home”
• Yuval Levin, “Heal the Sick and Reduce the Debt:
  The Moral Economy of the Healthcare Debate”
• Jane Robbins, “Empower Parents:
  Return Educational Policy to the States”
• Patrick Trueman, “End Child Pornography:
  Enforce Adult Pornography Laws”
• Laura Lederer, “End Human Trafficking:
  A Contemporary Slavery”
   
• Robert P. George, “Reflections of a Questioner:
  The Palmetto Freedom Forum Revisited”

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Congress enacted DOMA in 1996 by an 84% margin, demonstrating broad bi-partisan support. When it did so, Congress stated that “at bottom, civil society has an interest in maintaining and protecting the institution of heterosexual marriage because it has a deep and abiding interest in encouraging responsible procreation and child-rearing. Simply put, government has an interest in marriage because it has an interest in children.” This statement still holds true. As evidenced by the most extensive national research survey on Americans’ attitudes about marriage, 62% of Americans agree that “marriage should be defined only as a union between one man and one woman.”

What DOMA addresses is not just a law or creature of statute, but a social institution that has universally crossed all political, religious, sociological, geographical, and historical lines. As the philosopher and self-described atheist Bertrand Russell wrote, “But for children, there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex.” He continued, “it is through children alone that sexual relations become of importance to society, and worthy to be taken cognizance of by a legal institution.” Renowned anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed that “the family—based on a union, more or less durable, but socially approved, of two individuals of opposite sexes who establish a household and bear and raise children—appears to be a practically universal phenomenon, present in every type of society.”

From lexicographers who have defined marriage, to academic scholars who have explained marriage, to legislatures and courts that have legally recognized marriage, all demonstrate that a key purpose of marriage is to benefit society by procreative relationships. Marriage between a man and a woman is a long-standing, world-wide institution that is a building block of society.

Marriage doesn’t proscribe conduct or prevent individuals from living how they want to live. It doesn’t prohibit intimate relationships or curtail one’s constitutional rights. Federal legislation that protects marriage as a binding, exclusive, and procreative relationship has the public purposes of marriage—most notably, to continue human existence—at heart. The effort to repeal DOMA, however, tries to replace these essential public purposes of marriage with various private purposes. Our discussion of DOMA and its repeal should not be about the private reasons why individuals marry, why the institution of marriage benefits any particular couple, or why any two people should or should not marry. Instead, we must speak about social policy for our country as a whole and the government’s interest in marriage as an institution.

Due to the public nature of the government’s interest in marriage, a couple’s entrance into marriage has never been conditioned on the couple’s ability and desire to find happiness together, on their level of financial entanglement, or on their actual personal dedication to each other. Because the scope of due process rights is determined not by anyone’s individual circumstances, but by the country’s history, traditions, and legal practices, marriage laws stem from the fact that children are the natural product of sexual relationships between men and women, and that both fathers and mothers are viewed to be necessary and important for children. Thus, throughout history, diverse cultures and faiths have recognized marriage between one man and one woman as the best way to promote healthy families and societies.

Moreover, studies and data from the social sciences have long demonstrated that for children, the ideal family structure is one headed by two opposite-sex biological parents in a low-conflict marriage. Even President Obama supports active and involved fatherhood for all children; he knows all too well the pain of not having a father during his childhood, even though he was raised by a loving mother. As he stated:

We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

Likewise, a child psychologist who testified in support of a lawsuit that would judicially impose same-sex marriage on California citizens wrote, “Both mothers and fathers play crucial and qualitatively different roles in the socialization of the child.”

But advocates for redefining marriage are asking you to cast aside the natural attachment of parents to their own children, and the natural desires of children to know who they are and where they came from. These advocates are asking the whole of society to ignore the unique and demonstrable differences between men and women in parenthood: no mothers, no fathers, just generic parents.

But there are no generic people. We are composed of two complementary, but different, halves of humanity. As Rutgers University sociologist David Popenoe puts it,

We should disavow the notion that “mommies can make good daddies,” just as we should disavow the popular notion . . . that “daddies can make good mommies.” . . . The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being.

The Senate should also disavow the idea that since the Obama administration refused to defend DOMA, its repeal is somehow a constitutional mandate. In 1967, the Supreme Court decided the case of Loving v. Virginia. In the Loving case, the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a race-based marriage law that prohibited whites from marrying anyone of color. In so ruling, the Supreme Court called marriage “fundamental to our very existence and survival,” because of its procreative aspects. The procreative nature of marriage is what brought about miscegenation laws in the first place. The Court’s ruling returned marriage in the United States to its original status in common law—an institution not to be manipulated by racial prejudice, but to be honored as the union of one man and one woman.

Those who push for redefining marriage often cite Loving to support their arguments. But in doing this, they miss the Court’s link between marriage and procreation. Even the Department of Justice, in its new refusal to defend DOMA, does not cite the Loving case as support for its new anti-marriage position.

Same-sex marriage supporters also routinely overlook a noteworthy court case argued and decided in 1972, five years after the Loving decision. The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal from the Minnesota Supreme Court that claimed an alternate definition of marriage was a basic human right. In Baker v. Nelson, the Minnesota Supreme Court rejected claims for same-sex marriage and held that “in commonsense and in constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex.” The Court’s rejection also emphasized a defining link between marriage and “the procreation and rearing of children.” The United States Supreme Court upheld the Minnesota Court’s decision. Not a single Justice of the United States Supreme Court found the constitutional claims for an alternate definition of marriage substantial enough even to warrant a review.

Since the Baker case, every appellate court in this country, both state and federal, that has addressed the validity of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, under the United States Constitution, has upheld the institution as rationally related to the state’s interest in responsible procreation and child-rearing. And while some may argue that times have changed, they cannot credibly argue that humanity, as a gendered species, has changed. Men and women still compose the two great halves of humanity. Men and women are still wonderfully and uniquely different, and men and women still play important and irreplaceable roles in the family. As stated by the Supreme Court, “The truth is that the two sexes are not fungible; a community made up exclusively of one is different from a community composed of both; the subtle interplay of influence one on the other is among the imponderables.” “‘Inherent differences’ between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration.”

Without question, the overwhelming majority of people on both sides of this debate are good and decent Americans, coming from all walks of life, all political parties, all races and creeds—but humanity remains unchanged as a collection of men and women. And since it will always be true that children are the product of sexual relationships between men and women, and that men and women each bring something distinctive to the table of parenting, this government maintains a compelling interest in protecting and preserving the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Marriage between a man and a woman naturally builds families—mom, dad, and children—and gives hope that the next generations will carry that family into the future.

Austin R. Nimocks is Senior Legal Counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund. Read the original Senate testimony—with full citations—here.

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Philosophy and Name-calling

No serious philosopher would deny, in so many words, that to demonize opponents is to betray the vocation of philosophy. Yet some academic philosophers are so bound to the cause of redefining civil marriage that they would marginalize dissenters with epithets and analyze them as specimens of psychological pathology. Chappell, though he goes on to ask serious questions, is at pains to deny that he deems our argument worth engaging. For him, it is, like misogyny, merely unreasonable, subrational, and bigoted. Linking to Chappell’s critique, Brian Leiter repeats the charge and presumes to diagnose us.

The fervent policing of this newfound academic consensus, with its chilling effect on discourse, might be defensible if proponents of the conjugal view were, like Nazis or cannibals, advocates of ideas and policies repugnant to deep, enduring principles of our civilization. Yet even within the small, unrepresentative society that is academic philosophy, the very idea of same-sex marriage would have seemed mostly baffling (perhaps even patriarchally motivated) less than a generation ago. One might see the striking subsequent development as an epiphany of timeless moral principle denied the human race (including the sexual-traditionalist Mahatma Gandhi and other partisans of cruel and complacent class ideologies) these several millennia; or one might judge the cause of redefining civil marriage to be a fashionable application of a perfectly disputable view of sex and human goods that has grown to dominate in the academy from its proximate roots in the ’50s and ’60s, in Sanger and Hefner, Kinsey and Reich.

I happen to think the latter a more reasonable interpretation. Human nature being what it is, there is a light burden of proof on anyone alleging insularity, and I happily accept that advantage; but it’s still worth exploring why anyone in the academy would bear the social and professional risks of a contrarian stance.

Clearly “homophobia” is not the only possible motivation for the conjugal thesis. According to that thesis, we can’t properly understand marriage apart from the procreative sort of bodily communion of spouses achieved in coitus. Some claim this is a gerrymandered definition built to exclude homosexually oriented people, but one might as well claim that Attic Greek grammar was designed to frustrate Victorian schoolboys. Before the 19^th century, as far as we can tell, the very category of the “homosexual” had at best a sketchy existence. Homosexual acts were known and (for centuries in the West) widely condemned, along with analogous acts between a man and a woman, but there is little evidence that a category of people marked by exclusive and enduring homosexual orientation was recognized consistently or sharply enough to stir up group animus. To a man like Samuel Johnson, for example, though sodomy was immoral, “homosexuals” as an object of group hatred did not exist as “Frenchmen” or “Whigs” did, but at best as “drunkards” did, and yet the fundamentals of our marriage law, including the norm that a marriage could be consummated by no act other than coitus (when all the live but rejected alternatives were acts between a wedded man and woman), long predate Dr. Johnson. If this norm did not express belief in a deep link between marriage and the procreative sort of bodily union achieved in coitus, how can we explain it?

Nor can the conjugal view be “blamed” on religion, Brian Leiter’s preferred basis for dismissal and diagnosis. There is a 2,400-year-old philosophical tradition, originating independently of Judaeo-Christian influence, that distinguished the uniquely comprehensive and procreative sort of union consummated by coitus from all others, and affirmed its distinct personal and social value. This is the view to which Plato, Aristotle, Xenophanes, Musonius Rufus, and Plutarch adhere. Especially clear is Plutarch’s statement in Erotikos that marriage is a special kind of friendship uniquely embodied (“renewed”) in coitus (and not other climactic acts, which Plutarch regarded as intrinsically shameful).           

These points are not meant as an argument from history and authority. They are meant to clear ground recently grown thick with sharp, venomous moralism, so that intelligent debate can thrive—including in academic philosophy, to which, after seven years of undergraduate and graduate study, I owe my intellectual formation.

The Argument

Before replying to Chappell’s critique, it is worth orienting the reader with a précis of my positive claims.

A marriage, like any other voluntary personal union (broadly, like any friendship), exists when persons commit to activity toward common ends, and is fostered by such activity. The particular union created by commitment to marriage, however, is uniquely comprehensive in (a) how it unites persons, (b) what it unites them with respect to, and (c) what kind of commitment it demands.

(a) Marriage unites persons both volitionally and bodily. (b) Spouses unite bodily only by coitus, which is ordered to bringing new human life into the world. New life, in a sense, is one human good among others, but in another sense, it transcends and includes other human goods. Thus, unlike other forms of community (e.g., universities or sports teams), marriage is ordered to realizing not just this or that human value (e.g., knowledge or play), but new loci of value—persons—and thus also the broad domestic sharing uniquely apt for their development. (c) Marriage inherently calls for permanence and exclusivity.

To expand on (a), the bodily union of two people is like the bodily union of organs in an individual. Just as one’s heart, lungs, and other organs form a unity by coordinating for a biological good of the whole (i.e., the organism’s life), so a man’s and woman’s bodies form a unity by mutual coordination (coitus) for a biological good (reproduction) of their union as a whole.

As for (b), there is a deep connection between this, the marital (conjugal) act and the core of a distinctively marital common life, also shaped by an orientation toward procreation, onto which cultures and couples graft other practices according to circumstance and taste: Having committed to sharing in the generative acts that unite them bodily, spouses cooperate in other areas of life (intellectual, recreational, etc.) in the domestic sharing uniquely apt for fostering children’s overall development. And of course they cooperate in the tasks of parenting where children do come. Ordinary friendships, however, the unions of hearts and minds embodied in conversations and various joint pursuits, can have more limited and variable scope.

Finally, (c): In view of its comprehensiveness and its orientation to children’s needs, only marriage inherently requires of its would-be participants pledged permanence and exclusivity; thus is marriage, again like the unions of organs into one healthy whole, properly total and lasting for the life of the parts. (Indeed, comprehensive union can be achieved only by two because no single act can organically unite three or more people bodily.) Thus, again, is marriage uniquely apt for the procreation and education of offspring, an inherently open-ended task calling for unconditioned commitment. However, friendships as such require no promise of permanence and are often enhanced, not betrayed, by openness to new members; hence, abandon the conjugal view for a view of marriage as romantic coupling, and you forfeit the basis of all of these other distinctively marital norms.

Now there are many points worth making in response to Chappell, but so as not to overwhelm the reader or lose a sense of relative importance, I will address just three major failures of his argument. First, he does not show that our definition of marriage is arbitrarily restrictive, which fairly clears us of the charge of injustice. Second, he does not show how his own preferred view is any less arbitrary than he considers ours to be. Third, his response to our (rather peripheral and painfully cautious) references to social science is willful and irrelevant. I will demonstrate each failure in turn.

Chappell’s Failure on Conjugal Union

Chappell seems to recognize that much in this debate hinges on whether there could be basic moral significance to coitus chosen as an embodiment of the uniquely comprehensive and, relatedly, procreative sort of union sketched above. Yet Chappell handles this issue with the timeless tactic of simply begging the central question.

We maintain that coitus, as the only human biological functioning chosen and performed in partnership, can unite bodies and therefore persons, in a real and important sense. (Bodies are aspects of us as persons, not just our costumes or vehicles; so in human beings, bodily union can be a real part of a personal union when integrated with a commitment.) So coitus alone can be the distinctive element in the mind-body union, oriented to the full sharing of family life, that we call marriage. Manifestly, two people of the same sex can’t unite this way (any more than three or more can), so they cannot together form a marriage. On Chappell’s view, however, the bodily union of coitus chosen as the completion of such multi-level union has no intrinsic worth, and he dismisses our contrary view as “biological fetishism.”

Is it “biological fetishism” for millions of spouses to find it beautiful and uniquely appropriate that their children are a mixture of their bodies? Or for couples to see their infertility as a tragic limitation even when they can adopt? Or for proud new parents to care which healthy child is handed to them in the maternity ward?

I see Chappell’s “biological fetishism” and raise him “Manichean dualism”; for dualism is what his breezy dismissal of the value of bodily union betrays. I can also point him to book-length arguments in defense of our view that the body is an intrinsic aspect, not an extrinsic instrument, of the human person. Here I can cite other moral conclusions that lend support to this view: What is peculiarly perverse about torture? That it uses one aspect of the person (his body and affects) against another aspect of his self (wishes, choices, commitments). Why is rape gravely wicked even when performed on someone in a coma who never finds out and sustains no physical or psychic injuries? It still involves misusing—abusing—a person, and not merely using and replacing intact his or her property. Why can you licitly relinquish all future rights over your possessions, but not over your body or its capacities for labor? Again, because your body is part of you, not just your property.

A positive implication of this fact is what Chappell denies: that bodily union is integral to comprehensive personal union. What Chappell is pleased to call fetishizing biological functions is our insistence that, in embodied animals, comprehensive union must include bodily union, which must mean joint biological functioning (chosen to embody the spouses’ commitment). There is no other candidate for this than coitus, so the requirement that a comprehensive union—i.e., marriage—be capable of coital consummation is hardly arbitrary. Chappell merely states the opposite and so proves nothing, and the position he so signally fails to justify would render the concepts of a distinctively marital act or form of common life senseless or superstitious.

As for the commenters on his critique, several have carelessly read us (if they indeed have read our paper) as arguing for the immorality of certain conduct based on an organ’s proper functioning; but our article draws no conclusions about the permissibility of non-coital sexual acts, and as it happens, we all reject ‘perverted faculty’ arguments as fallacious. (Perhaps the philosophically minded lose their usual diligence when blasting “bigotry.” Thus, my favorite of the comments on Chappell’s critique: “Thanks for posting this. I haven’t had time to read the paper yet, but it looks like you’ve gotten to the heart of the problem.”)

Chappell’s Failure on an Alternative Conception of Marriage

Chappell also provides an alternative conception of marriage so vague that it forces this dismal choice on all who share his view: Either (i) marriage should be so open and flexible as to be unrecognizable and repugnant to the intuitions and settled beliefs of even most revisionists; or (ii) marriage law must be seen not as a matter of strict moral principle but as one contestable prudence, which deflates the arguments and obliterates the rhetoric of the movement to redefine civil marriage.

Imagine, for a minute, that there were no advocates of a coherent view of sexual complementarity in marriage, a view that has the support of the whole religious, legal, and cultural history of our species. We would still face the fact that marriage, if it is going to have meaningful public existence, must have some definition and some shaping norms. Such parameters risk excluding relationships that don’t meet the definition and stigmatizing people who reject (or for whatever reason don’t honor) the norms, so we had better have extremely good reasons for making them thus and not otherwise. So what does Chappell say? What is marriage?

He is not sure. In some sense, it is a comprehensive union of two persons, your number one relationship, so to speak, but it cannot really be limited, even by something as minimal as sexual exclusivity. He admits that on his view, sexual exclusivity must be a “contingent pragmatic/instrumental consideration (given the possible risk of sexual dalliances distracting or even drawing one away from one’s prior relationship), rather than anything essential to good marriages as such.” So a man who finds out that his wife regularly goes to the movies with another man, and who worries that she might start sleeping with him, has it backwards: He should worry that she’s sleeping with another man only if it means she might start going to the movies with him, and then buying ties for him, and then sampling specialty cheeses with him, and on and on, until the sickening crescendo—when he comes home early from work and finds them in the throes of chess on the marital kitchen table.

Even Chappell’s implausibly thin view is thicker than it has any right to be. For example, he seems to think marriage properly has some sexual component; but why, if sex is valuable only for its affective and expressive effects (which other activities can in principle provide) and not for uniquely making possible comprehensive union? Indeed, why should marriage be between two people? Why not share all your major life experiences and perhaps (but perhaps not) sexual activity with, say, three cohabiting (but why cohabiting?) lovers? Newsweek reports that the United States already has 500,000 polyamorous households. What possible objection could Chappell have to recognizing their relationships?

The problem is simple. Whatever he may say (and, I am sure, believe) about comprehensiveness and so on, Chappell, like most revisionists, can only conceive of marriage impressionistically, as some region to the far right of a spectrum of affective relations. This of course makes it hard to see why the state should care about marriage at all—any more than about baptisms, bar mitzvahs, or ordinary friendships. Exclusive coital relationships at least have a clear and intrinsic connection to children, but why should the state recognize tender relationships qua tender relationships? More devastatingly, this leaves Chappell no ground of principle—none whatsoever—for not including as marriages every relationship type describable in polite English: expressly temporary, multiple-partner, open, or even non-romantic relationships (e.g., between two loving sisters).

Nor is it simply the case that failing to recognize them would be awkward and faintly amusing, like the fact that you can go to war and die for the state before you can purchase alcohol. No, if revisionists are right to say that (a) marriage recognition, or at least equal treatment with respect to marriage recognition, is a basic human right and (b) arbitrariness about it is a grave injustice, then failure to recognize such unions on demand is a grave injustice, for which we shall have to answer to History, that dreaded deity (a liberal Democrat, it turns out) so often invoked against my coauthors and me.

As it happens the more consistent, or candid, revisionists have publicly reached conclusions that harmonize with mine. Five years ago, hundreds of scholars and activists—including Princeton’s Cornel West, Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum, and NYU’s Judith Stacey and Kenji Yoshino—argued that the state should equally recognize polyamorous and multiple-household sexual relationships, as well as a variety of non-sexual ones. These activists and I may well agree that abolishing the criterion of sexual complementarity would indeed ‘weaken’ marriage as the conjugal view’s supporters mean this: that it would leave no basis in principle for privileging (and so may well further erode in practice—cf. Andrew Cherlin’s The Marriage-Go-Round) its distinguishing norms. We only disagree on whether that would be bad, or in fact very good.

At this point in the debate conservative revisionists, alarmed by the prospect that has opened up before them, don the hat of the Pragmatic Man—and with it don his bluster, and his myopia. To his credit, Chappell himself doesn’t, but the move is so common that I should anticipate it. “What,” ask Pragmatic Men, “is all this talk of essences, definitions, and abstract rights and logical entailments? Like all social reality, marriage is a construct. What we owe people on equal terms is marriage as we understand it now. (The state should get involved in the first place because people would be very unhappy and perhaps generally more antisocial, if the state didn’t.) Now marriage, here and now, in the real world, means a sexually exclusive romance between two adults who more or less put each other first in life and have kids, or a dachshund, if they’re so inclined. That contingent notion includes same-sex romantic couples and excludes Laverne and Shirley. It’s as simple as that.”

This may at first sound very realistic and mature, but it is no help at all. First, its rejection of a deeper standard fails even to explain (if only then to reject) important legal and philosophical traditions. Again, these distinguished the class of comprehensive unions consummated by coitus, even when some such unions had no obvious social utility (e.g., the foreseeably and certainly infertile ones), and animus couldn’t have influenced the classifications. Second, the pragmatic aversion to objective standards is usually conveniently selective: many revisionists would accept that friendship, say, is (a) a fundamental human good, (b) distinct in principle from others (e.g., aesthetic experience), which (c) admits of cultural variation even as it (d) retains an objective core in the focal case: mutual and mutually acknowledged willing of the other’s good for the other’s sake. The status of marriage on the conjugal view is analogous in all four respects. If friendship, so understood, isn’t hopelessly mysterious, neither is marriage.

Third, even if there were no such bond objectively distinguishable in shape and value from the run of ordinary friendships, the pragmatic appeal to our current understandings would fail. In every one of the 31 states—including liberal ones like California, Wisconsin, and Maine—where the people have been allowed to vote, a solid majority has shown that their notion of marriage happens to include “intrinsically opposite-sex.” If there are no principled boundaries demarcating some intimate associations as marriages, then these majorities violate no principle in excluding same-sex partnerships. The merest (or, if sense can be made of such aggregations, a net) social benefit would suffice to justify traditional marriage law. Pro-gay-relationship liberals like David Blankenhorn have suggested such a basis for making sexual complementarity a condition for marriage. Have any compellingly argued the same of monogamy or exclusivity?

The real social fact of the matter seems to be that two rival models of marriage are currently in an open war (of doubtful issue). One model is the “romantic coupling” notion sketched by the pragmatists, and the other is the comprehensive procreation-oriented union for which we argue. The main prize in this war is, of course, the legal definition of marriage, which will give enormous social influence to one view or another. Pragmatic revisionists therefore simply ask their opponents to surrender on the grounds that they have already lost. If you find this kind of argument persuasive, I have some lovely Idaho oceanfront you might be interested in buying.

Chappell’s Failure on the Use of Social Science

Finally, Chappell objects to our citation of social science data to support privileging opposite-sex unions with respect to parenting. Of course, the normative issue of which arrangements our policies should privilege as generally ideal for procreation cannot be resolved by descriptive social-scientific studies alone, but such studies would contribute importantly relevant information. What we need, however, are studies that meet the acknowledged gold standard of social-scientific research, by drawing on large, random, and representative samples observed longitudinally. So far, however, as my coauthors and I elsewhere affirm and nowhere deny, none of the studies comparing children reared by same-sex couples in sexual partnerships to children reared by their married biological parents has these features, for reasons acknowledged in this literature review by a sociologist and Jonathan Rauch, a gay civil-marriage proponent.

Yet Chappell treats the issue as if it had been settled. He endorses the idea that it doesn’t matter, even as a rule, whether children are reared by a parent of each sex: “I think it’s important (as a rule) that children be raised in a stable and loving environment. I do not think that the genitalia of the parents matters.”

I would not be so polemical as to suggest that nobody in his five wits could reduce gender to genitalia except under the influence of an ideology contemptuous of reality. Instead I will suggest that, if with imperfect knowledge we are to give the tentative advantage to one side or another, as my coauthors and I do, these facts seem more pertinent that Chappell’s opinion: Every parenting arrangement that has been examined in high-quality studies has consistently been shown less effective than parenting by married biological parents: this is true of single- and step-parenting as well as parenting by cohabiting couples. Moreover, and more relevantly here, studies also suggest that mothers and fathers foster—and their respective absences impede—children’s healthy development in different ways. So, as we tried to show, it would be surprising if same-sex and opposite-sex parenting were equally effective. But let the methodologically sound studies be done, and the chips fall where they may.

Whose Humanism?

This debate is often seen as a struggle between Bigots (me and my ilk) and Humanists (Chappell and his), but though I do not believe Chappell to be a bigot, I do think defenders of the conjugal view are the true humanists. The more the conjugal view prevails culturally, the easier it will be on the unmarried, who will be less susceptible to thinking that what they lack is the most valuable or only kind of deep communion.

There is plenty of evidence that our society would benefit from such an emotional liberation. For example, on his Atlantic blog a few months ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates admitted that his recent historical reading had “actually opened up some portion of my own imagination—the possibility of feeling passionate, but not sexual, about someone who I wasn’t related to.” He confessed: “‘Passion’ isn’t a word that often enters into the description [of] friendships these days. And yet [it’s] present in the writings of previous generations”—when people didn’t equate marriage with intimacy, and intimacy with marriage, but recognized it as the paradigm realization of one type of intimacy among others. The conjugal view, precisely in presenting marriage as oriented to procreation—mothering and fathering—and true bodily union, not just shared experience, keeps from making marriage totalizing. It alone makes clear which activities we owe our spouses in marital love; which we owe it to them not to share with others; and which we could share now with them, now with others, without any compromise of principle.

Chappell’s revisionism would have us blur these distinctions. If marriage differs only by degree (and not in kind) from other bonds, then non-marital relationships, as between sisters or close friends, are diminished, for marriage offers simply the most of what makes any union valuable: shared experience. Those who (for whatever reasons) do not marry just settle for less.

So it is that the contemporary thought police, in their zeal to expurgate and erect barriers against an ideological offense and its perpetrators, miss the richly populated horizon visible from the more traditional perspective, a horizon with space for many types of communion, each with its own depth, passion, and constancy of presence and care.


Sherif Girgis, a 2008 Rhodes Scholar, is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Princeton University and a law student at Yale Law School. He earned an A.B. in philosophy at Princeton and a B.Phil. in philosophy at Oxford.

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First, in this era of political correctness, it appears that Americans are increasingly less likely to acknowledge what should be common sense—that “single parenthood and divorce make people and countries poor.” Harnish McRae continues by affirming that in order for these disconcerting trends to change, there must be an “altering of people’s attitudes.” Although we should always show compassion toward individuals who suffer from problems unique to non-traditional family structures, divorce, and pre-marital intercourse, none of these should be regarded from a morally neutral standpoint.

Second, in the name of compassion, people should acknowledge the unique challenges faced by children from non-traditional family structures. As Sara McLanahan states, “More than half of the children born…will spend some or all of their childhood apart from their biological fathers.” Unless more Americans acknowledge the unique challenges faced by many children in these family structures, the needs of so many youth will not only go unrecognized, but also unmet. In spite of these facts, American society has done little or nothing to defend the well-being of children in such a way as to reduce the liklihood of family dissolution. In fact, one can even argue that the U.S. government has instituted a tax system and implemented welfare programs that clearly undermine the strength of the family.

Third, American society should stop devaluing fathers and recognize that they are a crucial pillar of the family. Although parental divorce is far more common than it was prior to1963, research still indicates that children function best when they have both their biological parents present. Copious studies show that fathers and mothers each provide qualities that are very difficult, if not impossible, for the other gender to replicate. Not only have too many academics and leaders downplayed the effects of non-traditional family structures on children, but they also have devalued and in some cases even disparaged the roles that fathers play in the family. David Popenoe argues, “Fathers are important to their sons as role models. They are important for maintaining authority and discipline” as well as for helping sons develop “empathy” toward others. Research studies also consistently show that parents are far less likely than stepparents or other sexual partners to abuse children in the household.

Fourth, American society and particularly certain facets of society, such as Hollywood and the academic world, need to be more responsible in communicating to youth the importance of acting not only with integrity and sensitivity, but also with a prudent view of the long-term consequences of their actions. Since the 1960s, the average age of a person’s first act of sexual intercourse has lowered steadily. For youth to have their first act of sexual intercourse between the ages of eleven and thirteen is now quite common. In addition, during the 1960s until about 1970, only 2% of adults were cohabitating. Now approximately one-quarter of young adults engage in this type of relationship. Although many people identify these problems as those associated with racial differences, they are actually problems more closely connected to family structure than to race. “About 70% of African-American children are born out of wedlock, and many of the problems and challenges that people generally associate with African Americans are understood in a more complete and accurate context “when one considers this reality.” Teaching responsible behavior among young adults is imperative.

Fifth, American society needs to encourage institutions that serve to strengthen the family, including the church and other groups that promote loyalty and justice. Scholars have argued for many decades that Christianity promotes economic prosperity by its direct promotion of the family and by its support for a value system that is consistent with bringing wealth both to individual families and to the nation as a whole. Clearly, the Bible encourages not only marriage, but also marital fidelity and the faithful raising of children. Scripture exhorts parents to love and serve members of their family and to form children into loving, responsible adults. The phrase “faith and family values” is commonly used largely because of the connection between the Bible and strong families.

Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary present one of the most thorough examinations of the relationship between religion and economic prosperity. Essentially, their research concludes that “religion is good for the economy.” Americans should value churches and other institutions that esteem and promote marriage, faithfulness, and raising children in the ways of integrity.

Quantitative research makes it clear that marriage is a key pillar of economic prosperity. Unfortunately, the present system of government in the United States discourages marriage, marital fidelity, and loyalty to one’s spouse. As Popenoe asserts, “Women no longer need men for provision or protection…they have access to government supported welfare programs.” To make matters worse, Daniel Patrick Moynihan may have said it right when he asserted that too many Americans were defining deviance down. An increasing number of social scientists believe that the matter of family dissolution is being taken far too lightly by American society at large. As Popenoe observes, “Because children represent the future of our society, these negative consequences are a social calamity in the making.” As long as non-traditional family structures are becoming more widespread in American society, stimulus packages, no matter how highly leveraged they are in debt, will not raise the United States out of its present malaise.

A nation clearly lacks proper priorities when the basic truths that have prevailed in its society for several centuries are mercurially discarded in favor of programs that are unproven, ineffective, and unnecessarily complicated. When such a large number of non-traditional family structures are surging, many economic policies are relegated to short-term effects. Americans would do well to substantially reduce the extent to which they rely on government for economic solutions to the nation’s struggling GDP and instead rethink their definition of a healthy family based on eternal principles that have stood the test of time.


William Jeynes is Professor of Education at California State University, Long Beach. He is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute.

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The present political and economic strategies proposed to resolve our problems are patently superficial, especially when one considers that the surge of non-traditional family structures has unleashed deleterious forces upon the American economy for nearly five decades. It is probably no accident that, statistically speaking, the United States reached the pinnacle of its economic power in the mid-to-late 1950s. At that time, although the United States comprised just slightly over 5% of the world’s population, it produced 56% of the world’s goods.The United States then enjoyed the highest marriage rate in the world. By contrast, today America has the world’s highest divorce rate.

After a slight but steady decline from 1948 to 1962, the American divorce rate skyrocketed in 1963 and continued to rise for 17 consecutive years; the levels have hardly abated since. Daniel Lapin expresses the conclusions of countless social scientists when he argues that “for less than fifty years we have been living with the result of saying all ways of organizing families and societies are equally valid.” Aside from their pervasive effects on a number of behavioral and academic outcomes, non-traditional families produce a prodigious drag on the American economy. It is distressing that we apply what are nothing more than band-aid solutions to fix the American economy when these family factors are some of the most substantial long-term forces debilitating the country’s financial health.

The relationship between the two-biological-parent family and economic prosperity is an immense one. As Harnish McRae observes, “the conventional family is an efficient mechanism for combining bringing up children and making a living.” There are a number of reasons why non-traditional family structures constitute such a drain on the American economy. In fact, unless this trend is reversed, the United States appears destined to lose its position as the world’s foremost economic power, a position it has enjoyed since about 1900.

First, non-traditional family structures are the greatest cause of American children’s living under the poverty line. In the United States, only about 10% of children raised in a two-parent family live below the poverty line. Approximately 66% of children from single-parent families live below the poverty line. In addition, nearly 50% of adults who have lived on welfare consistently started there after becoming a single parent. Nicholas Wolfinger notes, “Divorce often takes a dramatic toll on women’s incomes. Partially as a result, rates of poverty for mother-headed households traditionally have been about five times those for two-parent families.” Since the rates of single-parenthood have risen so greatly, the largest proportion of the poor is no longer the elderly, but children.

Second, the United States has spent an unprecedented amount of money to support these children. No nation in the history of humanity has spent so many billions of dollars to improve the financial situation of the impoverished. From this we can conclude that no other civilization has ever so vigorously attempted to ameliorate the situations of single-parent children. The percentage of American children under the poverty line rose from 14% in 1969 to 20.6% in 1990. A growing number of researchers and politicians are acknowledging that the best anti-poverty program for children is a stable, intact family. The United States is creating a society in which the major distinguishing feature between the “haves” and the “have nots” is which child has a father at home.

Third, the prevalence of non-traditional family structures is putting the offspring of these parents at a competitive disadvantage with children from intact families, so that a smaller percentage of children from non-traditional families will likely realize their potential. Lief Jensen, David Eggebeen, and Daniel Lichter conclude that “changing family structure is the greatest long-term threat to U.S. children.” Children from non-intact families are much more likely to be on welfare.

McRae observes that “another set of costs is imposed by family break-up … Even after adjusting for the greater poverty of one-parent families, it appears that their children are more likely to leave school early, and to be unemployed than children from homes with two parents present.” Today it is almost universally recognized that the scholastic achievement of children wields great power over their future economic success. Poverty that results from single-parenthood is one of a variety of factors that causes single-parent families to be less stable for children than if they lived in an intact two biological parent family.

Fourth, the increase of non-traditional family structures has produced a large number of children who suffer from behavioral problems. Their struggles have robbed them of a good future and have hurt the lives of countless others affected by their actions. These behavioral problems significantly impact the long-term economic welfare of these youth.

Boys from single-parent families are much more likely to join gangs than their counterparts in two-parent families. Generally speaking, about 90% of adolescents and pre-adolescents in gangs come from single-parent families. This finding is consistent with conclusions reached by psychologists that one of the primary reasons that boys join gangs is because they are looking for a surrogate father. David Blankenhorn observes, “Put simply, we have too many boys with guns primarily because we have too few fathers.” Research has shown that many youth possess feelings of anger toward one or more family members because of family dissolution or because the child does not know who his or her father is.

Social scientists cannot be phlegmatic about the influence of single parenthood on children, because the consequences of this family structure are much more far-reaching than short- (or long-) term economic instability. David Popenoe declares,

Father absence is a major force lying behind many of the attention-grabbing issues that dominate news: crime and delinquency, premature sexuality, and out-of-wedlock teen births, deteriorating educational achievement, depression, substance abuse, and alienation among teenagers, and the growing number of women and children in poverty.

The truth is that children from fatherless homes are more likely to be rapists, murderers, or commit suicide. They are more likely to drop out of school, to be unemployed for long periods of time, and to be homeless. They are more likely to abuse women and their own children. The need for compassionate individuals who can reduce the effects and, more broadly, the incidence of single-parenthood is manifest. Children from intact families are less likely to have pre-marital intercourse and are less likely to get divorced than their counterparts from non-traditional family structures. On average, children from intact families consistently fare better by almost every measure of psychological, behavioral, and academic well-being than their counterparts in non-intact families. As Popenoe avers, “the problem of divorce would surely be less serious if children were not involved.”

If one considers Japan and South Korea as the nations that have experienced the greatest increase in their standards of living since 1960, it is no accident that each of these nations had very low levels of single parenthood during their times of explosive economic growth. During the 1960-1990 period, which was Japan’s period of most dramatic growth, the divorce rate in Japan was one of the lowest in the industrial world. Outside of the United States in the 1950s, it is also interesting to note that West Germany and Japan grew the fastest in legal marriages per 1,000 in population. In the 1960s, Japan surpassed the United States as the country with the highest marriage rate. Over the next twenty-five years, Japan has had the fastest growing economy in the world. (In the U.S., the divorce rate surged after declining from 1948 to 1962, so that the U.S. surpassed all industrial nations in this measure.) Similarly, today Korea has the lowest rate of pre-marital intercourse in the industrialized world. There is often a high positive correlation between marriage rates and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, and a negative correlation between divorce rates and GDP growth. Granted, these statistics are correlational and, were they to stand by themselves, they would not necessarily imply causation. However, the juxtaposition of these statistics with other facts indicates some of the reasons why there is such a strong relationship between marriage and economic growth. Appreciating this relationship can yield economic and social policies that are teeming with acumen far more than the policies of the present administration.

What should we do about these findings? Answers to that question in part two of this article.


William Jeynes is Professor of Education at California State University, Long Beach. He is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute.

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President Garvey’s stated reason for separating the sexes into their own buildings, starting with the incoming freshmen in the fall of 2011, is to combat the pattern of binge drinking and “hooking up” among the students, and the consequent risks to body, mind, and soul of these behavior patterns. He made no claim that separate living arrangements would magically cure the ills he diagnosed. But why contribute to the problem when you can at least foster solutions?

It ought to be surprising that Catholic University ever experimented with co-ed housing. But this essay will not be about the University’s decision to reverse course on student residential policy.  It will instead be about a revealing remark made by one of the opponents of the decision.

Elsewhere in the District of Columbia, at George Washington University, law professor John Banzhaf announced that he intended to sue Catholic University for sex discrimination under the District’s Human Rights Act. Banzhaf, a formidable nuisance as a litigator, told Inside Higher Ed that separating the sexes was like a return to the old evil of “separate but equal” in racial segregation:

“Suppose a university decided that there would be less racial tension if all the blacks were in a black dorm, all the whites were in a white dorm,” Banzhaf said. “Each one is, quote, getting their own dormitory, and maybe some of them would be happier that way. But surely no one would suggest that it’s lawful.” The statute does not require that a certain population be disadvantaged for an action to be illegal; the simple act of segregating the genders is enough, Banzhaf said.

Banzhaf may have a case under the D.C. Human Rights Act, or he may not. That will be for others to decide. But this parallel of his, between race and sex, is what should catch our attention. His argument, as a matter of justice and moral right, is only as good as the proposition that sex is just like race when it comes to our treatment of others. Banzhaf is sure that if it would be wrong to separate the races into different dormitories, even into facilities of identical quality, it would be equally wrong to separate the sexes.

But is sex just like race? Let us take it as given that justice demands a legal order that is, as the first Justice Harlan put it 115 years ago in Plessy v. Ferguson, “color-blind,” taking no notice of anyone’s race when it comes to his status or treatment in law and public policy. Would we say, in the same way, that the law should be “sex-blind,” taking no notice of the fact that some persons are men and others are women?

Even the Supreme Court has not gone this far. In perhaps its furthest-reaching sexual equality decision, United States v. Virginia (forcing Virginia Military Institute to admit female students in 1996), the Court still maintained that an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for treating the sexes differently would pass constitutional muster, in circumstances where racial distinctions would not. Considerations of privacy, safety, decency, and the virtue of members of both sexes would seem to be sufficient justification for separating the living accommodations of young men and women in college. The possibility that a policy of separation might run counter to the desires of many college-age men and women might only prove the justice of it.

And none of these considerations, turning on the risks and probabilities of sexual activity, with all the spin-off concerns about alcohol consumption, sexual assault, pregnancies and possible abortions, disease transmission, and plain old-fashioned “relationship problems,” would even merit our attention if we were asking whether the races should be separated. The best Professor Banzhaf can do is imagine that “racial tension” might be employed as a ground for separating the races. Our problem, when it comes to mixing or separating the sexes, is a bit more complicated than that, and begins with something rather the opposite of “tension.”

Banzhaf’s blithe parallel, however, of treating sex just like race is lately a favorite rhetorical turn of the campaign for same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court ruling cited by those making this argument is Loving v. Virginia (1967), in which the justices unanimously struck down the law of that state (and, by implication, those then remaining on the books in fifteen other states) against “miscegenation,” or inter-racial marriage.

The state of Virginia attempted to defend its policy by arguing, among other points, that the law treated both races equally, since it forbade whites to marry blacks, and blacks to marry whites, and assessed penalties under the law without regard to the race of those convicted. One hears similar defenses of marriage as a conjugal union between a man and a woman when the argument is made that the law treats heterosexual and homosexual alike, securing identical marriage rights to persons of either sexual orientation—to marry someone of the opposite sex. Is this formal-equality argument valid in both cases, or neither, or in one but not the other?

Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the Court in the Loving case, saw through the state’s claim to treat the races with formal equality when he noted that because the law prohibited “only interracial marriages involving white persons”—not, for instance, a marriage between a person of African descent and one of Asian descent—it was evident that the law was “designed to maintain White Supremacy.” In like vein, the advocates of same-sex marriage treat the argument that “gays and lesbians too can marry persons of the opposite sex” as a cruel joke, and focus on the fact that they are not permitted to marry the persons they wish to marry. Thus, their complaint runs, there seems to be some “Heterosexual Supremacy” at work in the determination to preserve marriage as it has always existed, as a union of man and woman.

As Chief Justice Warren pointed out, the anti-miscegenation laws of Virginia and other states “proscribe[d] generally accepted conduct if engaged in by members of different races,” and thus interfered with a “freedom of choice to marry” on grounds that were simply irrelevant to the marital relation: race, and race alone. If not for the laws against inter-racial marriage, a man and a woman of different races would have enjoyed the freedom to marry in the ordinary course of things, barring other difficulties that are relevant to the marital relation (age of consent, consanguinity, and the freedom of a single person who would not be committing bigamy by entering a new marriage).

But Warren’s reasoning makes no sense except on the tacit presumption of another consideration, so integral to the marital relation that in 1967 it did not occur to him to state it, although it is implicit in his phrase “generally accepted conduct”—and that is, that the two persons free and capable of marrying are a man and a woman. Virginia and other states, in their anti-miscegenation laws, had interfered with a natural relationship by introducing something—race—that was at right angles to it. To rule out bigamy, or to regulate the age of consent, or the degrees of permitted consanguinity—all these place conditions on the freedom to marry that are oriented toward the fulfillment of marriage’s purposes. But introducing race into those conditions injects another purpose—racial “purity”—into the institution, forcing it to serve an end alien to itself. When unmarried, unrelated adult men and women choose to marry, they enter into a relation that is good in itself, a relation of opposite-sex individuals capable of the kind of union, and the only kind of union, that naturally produces offspring. The laws of marriage can and should facilitate, regulate, and solemnize this relation, and provide that it endure. But when political authorities permitted some marriages, and prohibited others, on racial grounds, they were interfering with it in pursuit of goals foreign to its nature, and acting unjustly in two ways, both in their racial discrimination and in changing the meaning of marriage. They were, in short, instrumentalizing marriage as a tool of state policy rather than honoring its nature and fostering it as what it is.

The advocates of same-sex marriage attempt a Loving-style “freedom of choice to marry” argument when they challenge the laws now in place to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples. In its 2009 ruling in Varnum v. Brien, for instance, the Iowa Supreme Court noted that in 1998 the state legislature had acted for the first time to “define marriage as a union between only a man and a woman.” The court went on to say that “except for [this] statutory restriction,” the same-sex couples applying for marriage licenses would have “met the legal requirements to marry in Iowa.”

But such a statement is flagrantly facetious. The Iowa legislature did not introduce a new, orthogonal consideration into the law of marriage in 1998. It did not, in fact, make new law at all, but only codified an age-old understanding, consistent with the nature of marriage itself, precisely in order to ward off a bizarre new challenge hitherto unheard of—the applications, and litigious responses to denied applications, of same-sex couples seeking to marry. Only the determined campaign of those who would redefine marriage had prompted Iowa legislators—and by now, the voters in 30 states who have amended their constitutions—to say anything at all in the law about the sex of those who are permitted to marry. In the normal course of things up until the last two decades, the law did not bother to state a “restriction” that was understood to be no restriction at all but merely a natural fact: men and women get married, but men and men or women and women do not.

Today it is those claiming a specious “freedom to marry” who make a claim at odds with the institution’s nature and alien to its purposes. It is they who would instrumentalize it by a redefinition, a destroying and remaking, that puts marriage to a new kind of work in the service of state policy. For race and sex are not, in the final analysis, really just like one another at all.  Race is an interesting cluster of facts about ancestry, history, culture, and geography; we can let it get in the way of human relations by making too much of it, or thinking about it in wrongheaded ways. We can, and for many purposes should, let it alone entirely.

Sex, on the other hand, is fundamental to our relations with one another. We cannot let it alone.  We cannot wish away its normal fruits of attraction, passion, and the generation of offspring, or its intimate connection with virtue and vice, wisdom and folly. Catholic University’s President Garvey is right to treat the relations of the sexes in the college population as a matter of the utmost moral gravity, justifying measures that would be intolerable if race were the difference under consideration. So too, in the debate over marriage, we must not be led astray by farcical assimilations of sex to race, as though differential treatment along those two dimensions were exactly alike, when they are not.


Matthew J. Franck is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute.

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His articles reveal how odd it is for one group to fiat the end of debate by declaring a particular set of arguments unworthy of consideration; or, more peculiarly, by declaring that these arguments may not be considered without thereby revealing one’s own status as bigoted, hateful, and offensive.

These absurdities to which Franck points make criticism in contemporary argument a process often uncomfortable and futile. In his masterful That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect, Stefan Collini summarizes our resulting hesitation toward argument by explaining how debate is shut down when members of criticized groups believe they are at a historical disadvantage. For many contemporaries, he writes, “an enlightened global politics” requires “treating all other people with equal respect and, second, trying to avoid words or deeds which threaten to compound existing disadvantages.” Given their historically disadvantaged and ostracized position, Collini reports, it is thought that some “social groups … have an equal right to hold or express their convictions without being ‘dissed’ by anyone else.” In other words, to argue against a historically disadvantaged group is apparently to commit an intrinsically hateful, bigoted, and offensive act.

Offense cannot but emphasize “the subjectivity of the person offended.” Yet Collini rightly insists that the mere fact of feeling offended is an insufficient reason to believe that one should take offense; rather, there is “some element of conviction that such a reaction is legitimate or justified.” Since one who takes offense realizes to some degree that he reacts to a case “that others will find appropriate or persuasive … about something generally acknowledged to be significant,” his mere feeling of being offended is not endowed with “unchallengeable authority.” Nevertheless, if the dominant culture is thought to be “constituted by precisely those widespread assumptions and habits” that the offended party finds offensive, appeals to general acknowledgment as the standard of legitimacy hardly settles the problem of subjectivity. Indeed, it is precisely when the majority culture is tone-deaf that an oppressed group’s subjective experience allegedly requires no other justification than its own offense.

Collini argues that the heart of the matter is resentment against those perceived as powerful; even if the criticism against our belief or action has some tinge of truth to it, the feeling of powerlessness is worsened when the criticism is by them (of all people!) against us, and against us now. Here Collini articulates a profound problem: If someone of good fortune or historical privilege criticizes me, and I belong to a subordinate group conscious of its subordination and articulating this feeling to the dominant group, then “their own relative good fortune,” it is felt, “should disqualify them as critics in this case.”

If it were true that someone’s good fortune or historical privilege disqualifies him or her as a critic of lesser privileged groups, then we could understand the claim that even good arguments against same-sex marriage should not be made when members of the subordinate class, namely those desirous of same-sex marriage, “are already vulnerable on other counts.” On this account, good arguments might be persuasive, but persuasion is a “species of power.” Consequently, by refusing to allow the dominant group to argue, the subordinate group sees itself as “standing up for … autonomy,” for its dignity and right to be respected.

Collini’s description of contemporary offense partially explains, it seems, the phenomenon discussed by Franck: even if there are good arguments against same-sex marriage, they are “disqualified” as hateful and bigoted when they are made by a historically dominant group. The better the arguments, the more offensive the position, it is thought, and the more that position must not be considered, but instead be subjected only to scorn by all thinking persons of good will.

This standoff followed by ceasefire presents a dilemma. On the one hand, arguments made against the positions and actions of the disadvantaged require special care and caution so as to avoid that unjust reality where public reason masks a power ploy, even if implicitly and unintentionally so. Fair argument demands, at the least, frank discourse among equal partners, but equality can be made difficult by history; equality can be subverted by frankness when one appeals to general consensus at the expense of the powerless.

On the other hand, Collini is correct that taking offense should “be regarded as initiating a reasoned argument rather than foreclosing on one.” In fact, if offense is a demand for equal respect, then argument should follow on offense, “for how does respect exist except in the company of critical judgment?” To pretend that those who are mistaken are either correct or are “too fragile or too touchy or too stupid to bear reasoned disagreement is to condescend to them … is precisely not to treat them as equal adults.”

Collini’s defense of criticism rejects the primacy of identity politics with its “defining error” of acting “as though one characteristic over-rides all others, thereby homogenizing those who possess it and imposing a binary separation from those who do not.” It is not membership in particular communities based on race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation that matters most, for the “most important identity we can acknowledge in another person is the identity of being an intelligent reflective human being.” All persons are “potentially capable of understanding the grounds for any action or statement that concerns us.” Treating others as “reflective intelligent individuals not wholly reducible to being members of any one community” is not a Western or liberal standard; it is a human one. Any other standard, he claims, treats the other with condescension, as below us. Treating others with respect can require great effort, but exempting others from criticism is not respectful.

There is, Collini argues, a “right to be offended,” and using offense to end criticism “may not only deny the rights of the speaker—it may deny the rights of the listener as well.” Humans reveal their humanity in their ability to offer justification for their actions and beliefs, and to exempt an individual or group from the requirement to justify themselves reveals contempt, even if benignly intended.

Nonetheless, it remains the case, as Franck describes, that some individuals or groups reject arguments against their position merely because those arguments are made now (when we should know better given our knowledge of historical disadvantage) by them (the powerful) against us (the powerless), and indignation and offense are thought legitimate and autonomous responses. How, then, are we to defend criticism when it contributes, or is perceived to contribute, to unfairness?

The key realization is that offense operates within the realm of reason. When I am offended, I have not simply felt resentment, nor merely intuited a wrong; I have performed a cognitive act, namely, judging based on what seem to me to be good and understandable reasons for that act of judging. Whenever we make a judgment of fact (x is) or value (x ought to be), we commit ourselves to the truth and worth of our judgment. To do otherwise disqualifies us from reasonable discussion, as there would be no reason to be taken seriously if we did not claim that our judgment had worth.

Fair criticism aims at truth, at a judgment of what is the case. Offense also demonstrates a commitment to the truth, and thus both criticism and offense share a commitment to truth as an intrinsically valuable aim of human action. Both the critic and the offended party, then, seek truth as a value, and their seeking of truth demonstrates that truth is valuable for everyone like themselves, that is, for all humans. Consequently, both criticism and offense judge truth to be a human good. This judgment also claims that truth is a good for beings like oneself, and so to pursue truth through criticism is to demonstrate that one believes the other is equal to oneself and to wish a good for them—which is a kind of friendship.

Consequently, (1) to take offense is to make a truth claim that one asserts as serious, as does offering criticism; (2) to make a judgment is to claim that truth is good and worth attaining, and it is impossible to seriously deny this without contradiction; (3) to judge that truth is a good is to claim that it is a good for those equal to you; (4) to criticize, and to take offense at that criticism, is to claim that others are your equals and are benefitted by the same goods as you; (5) to criticize is a mark of friendship, which is itself a condition of ethical discourse.

As Franck highlights, we find ourselves in a strange situation when argument is considered unreasonable. I can sympathize with those communities that view themselves as subordinate, and I can understand why they might resent arguments and criticisms made from the majority culture, but to comply with their request for equality in the way they have requested it would be to render them unequal, and that is a wicked thing to do.


R. J. Snell is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University.

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Marriage-movement social scientists establish the relationship between variables. The greatest living defender of the family from the standpoint of social science is David Popenoe, whose work, helpfully and self-consciously, shows the limits of the social-scientific perspective. Popenoe establishes in his Life Without Father that family decline, as encapsulated in the decline of fatherhood, leads to the “human carnage of fatherlessness”—to crime, educational failure, future family failure, lower incomes, future violence, personal dependency on government, and other signs of social and psychic sickness. Contemporary society, in disturbing the nest, reaps the whirlwind.

Popenoe and his compatriots in the marriage movement truly reveal an inconvenient truth, and feminists—ardent separators or de-institutionalizers—tirelessly seek to combat the methods and conclusions of the marriage movement. These critics do have a point, as Popenoe recognized. Today’s “human carnage” may well be just a bump on the road toward greater de-institutionalization; new institutions may arise to meet the needs of old ones; and right now we are suffering through the birth pains for an emerging post-nuclear family order.

Popenoe’s depth of purpose lies in his attempt to show that there is a natural or anatomical basis for his sociological findings and that we cannot expect any institution to answer the demands of nature as well as the nuclear family can. Popenoe’s social science becomes sociobiology with a Darwinian basis, which allows him to attribute some degree of permanence to his findings. Marriage is a solution to the natural problem of childhood dependence, and each spouse is biologically and anatomically suited to provide what is necessary for the other and for the raising of children. Hear Popenoe:

Even though family life today is heavily shaped by a massive layer of culture, the predispositions of our biological makeup are ever present. It is almost certainly the case that families are more than just arbitrary social constructs that can be redesigned at will. They are partly rooted in biology, especially because they intimately concern what is most basic to life—the reproduction of the species.

Popenoe arrives at the nature of nature through studies showing the historically constant attributes of family life, the traits of men and women, and the needs of maturing children. Nature, for Popenoe and other sociobiologists, does not have a particular destiny or direction; it does not invite us to wonder about the meaning of the historically constant. Nature is. Nature is inescapable, and any effort to deny the is-ness of nature involves putting ideology before sound science.

I honor the findings of Popenoe and others, but I do not think they are, of themselves, adequate as a defense of the family. They reproduce the problems of sociology on another level, because it is entirely possible, as feminists suggest, that other institutions could arise in response to the challenges of nature. Further, it is difficult to get modern peoples, so taken with the idea of conquering nature, to respect the is-ness or inescapability of nature. We have so often transgressed the supposed boundaries of nature that we no longer really doubt our power to do so. We need a compelling reason to respect nature and to react to nature’s challenges with humility and awe instead of as conquerors.

Unable to find the permanence we need in anatomy, it is necessary to turn to moral philosophy to show how nature, as it manifests itself in marriage and family life, is connected to the permanent human good of betrothed love. For this, we must recover the logic of marital unity and put the necessities that are implicated in marriage and family life in their proper place. This is the logic of marital unity. When marriage concerns serious ends, it makes demands on the time and resources of the couple; the more serious the ends, the more serious the demands. The more time- and resource-intensive the demands, the more members of the family are likely to practice some form of the division of labor to meet those demands. Married couples strive for ends, in other words, that exist in time and space or in life—so they implicate “necessities” within a larger context of meaning.

The necessities of nature gain their dignity by their relation to the ends of marriage. While it is easy for feminists, for instance, to depict the mundane tasks of motherhood and housekeeping as Sisyphean tasks, such necessitous household activities contribute to the building of a home, which is, at least in part, a home of love. In the context of love, the household management of a mother takes on greater dignity and receives higher meaning. Dusting or washing are acts of self-giving that contribute to an environment of nurturing that can best take place in the intense order of family life. There are certainly contractual appearances to this relationship—the husband and wife say “I do” and they agree on how to divide household labors. The contractual appearance, however, is only a moment in the experience of marriage and family life. Marriage may, as Hegel, that oracle of clarity, tells us, “begin from the point of view of contract,” but it does so “in order to supersede it.” This supersession is love, and love is a permanent human good that defines the order of the family.

As we hear so often today, love makes the family. What is love? Most refrain from raising this more significant question, for fear that such a question would give rise to endless controversy or hopeless subjectivity. Here, again, I would suggest that nature or anatomy must be understood in the light of love, the permanent attribute that lends meaning to the natural. Nature points up, toward the love that defines marriage and family life. We see this in sex, which reflects a human search for completion by joining with another, and which cannot be consummated without another. Though sex does not really satisfy that desire for another and sexual desire is soon extinguished when satisfied, this does not mean that one is alone. Sex happens on the level of the passions and the body, but points to something higher than itself. Genuine love integrates and subordinates the moment of sex within this larger unified framework. A relationship based on sex is not a proper marital relationship—though sex is part of a marital relationship—because it does not put sex in its proper place.

Betrothed love also grows from two becoming one in the procreation of children. A couple practices a form of self-giving in their life together, providing a fertile ground for the self-giving of parenthood. Parenthood is a picture of marital unity. A couple’s unified love is literally present in the person of the child, which explains why parents so often love their children more than their children love them: children are living embodiments of marital unity. Married couples are more than parents, yet parenthood points to the betrothed love that makes parents, in part, more than parents.

Modern thinkers, with partial exceptions, initiated a revolution in marriage at the level of betrothed love. They questioned whether self-giving was healthy, possible, safe, or consistent with human liberty and equality. Love implies dependence on another instead of autonomy, and it shows that certain goods (sex and procreation, love and marriage, marriage and parenthood) are connected. When the self-giving of betrothed love is no longer the end of marriage, the preparation ground for parenthood erodes; divorce seems more tenable as partners hold something back; more individualistic principles fill in to justify or define marriage; and sex and procreation, no longer pointing beyond themselves toward a higher good, come to be seen as individual goods or burdens instead of as common goods.

Marriage has contractual moments, but it ultimately, as Hegel writes, supersedes the point of view of contract as the individuals lose their identity by becoming members of the family. A healthy culture recognizes this and laws create a fertile space for such mutual self-giving. It is difficult to see how a healthy marriage culture can exist until we recover the language of self-giving to reflect its continuing reality in our lives. The language of contract is not sufficient to that experience.


Scott Yenor is Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at Boise State University.  This article is drawn partly from his book Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought (February 2011).

Part I of this article may be read here.

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This stripping of functions is also, however, cause for serious worry, for the functions of the family can almost always be exported to other institutions or arrangements or the need for them can seem to disappear from human life altogether. We must know what constitutes the family’s end or purpose lest we face the ultimate in family decline.

The “loss of function,” afoot, in some sense, since pre-classical times, has accelerated due to two powerful intellectual movements. First, the idea of marriage as a contract, derived from modernity’s overriding concern with personal liberty, has successively thinned the family to the point that marriage and family life are, from the standpoint of public philosophy, seriously under-employed. Early liberal thinkers, such as John Locke, thought the chief end of marriage was the procreation and education of children. For Locke, the heterosexual, conjugal family best prepares children for self-government in a free society (and much social science data still confirm Locke’s argument). Since this is the case, Locke held that the public could supervise and encourage what came to be called the bourgeois family form and require that parents stay together until their children reach the age of maturity.

As successive theorists called into question whether Locke had accurately apprehended the function of marriage, they also called into question its form. Liberal and radical theorists, such as John Stuart Mill and some of today’s feminist thinkers, suggested that marriage could take on whatever function the marital partners choose. It is with the family in mind that Mill recommends “different experiments of living” and counsels that “different persons . . . require different conditions for their spiritual development.” The failure to impute a function to marriage meant that the public would have to open up the question of form, requiring public approval of either different or more diverse forms, or, perhaps, no form at all. Even those defending marriage and family life in the modern world, such as French sociologist Emile Durkheim, writing around 1900, thought that the family was too emotionally intense and that parents were too partisan on behalf of their children to be entrusted with the moral education of the young. Durkheim ended up defending the two-parent heterosexual family as the most effective means of taming the man’s sexual passion and directing his otherwise socially disruptive desire for the infinite.

Mill’s advocacy on behalf of the private definition of contract, combined with Durkheim’s willingness to export the family’s educative function to the state, seriously undermined any case for the public supervision of the marriage contract, and it prepared the ground for an acceleration of the exportation of functions from the family. Durkheim and Mill both focused the attention of family on the married adults, tending to strip functions related to the upbringing of children from the family’s domain. The only remnant of state recognition—in the name of cultivating self-control among males—was a thin reed on which to defend family life, especially in the face of Freudian theory (which called into question the goodness of self-control) and feminism (which questioned whether marriage was good for woman).

Today’s theorists impute to marriage squishy, individualistic functions—such things as achieving personal fulfillment or sharing access to social services—in order to show that any form will do, so long as individuals consent to it. Originally, the public helped shape family form by aligning it with the procreative and educative function, but over time intellectuals thought that these functions were better conducted elsewhere or that these functions were really tools of oppression, and thus these same intellectuals accepted many forms of marriage and family life. This move from the public definition of the contract to the private definition of contract seems to be the natural outgrowth of the individualistic principles that justified the original idea of marriage as a contract.

The family’s loss of functions is connected to a second, deeper intellectual trend in modernity: the movement to conquer nature. The household arises due to the natural and inescapable facts of life—the utter dependence of children on parental support and the need for a mother to support and receive protection from a father. Yet human beings are not enslaved to their biology: the borders of what constitutes a natural imperative have changed as human beings have sought to increase their empire over nature, and have invented new modes to deal with the natural imperatives of age and sex difference. Seeking to show that these two imperatives are not as imperial as people first thought, modern thinkers re-design the household in different ways. This effort begins, again, with Locke, who exhorts people to free themselves from the imperatives to which nature seems to have consigned human relations. Among the “almost natural” institutions that Locke would have human beings shed is patriarchal government and pain in childbirth. Subsequent thinkers, particularly Mill, emphasize the social construction of gender, seeing natural sex differences as tools invented to keep women in a state of slavery. Later waves of feminist thinkers worked out his logic, showing that fathers and mothers were positively harmful in their effects on children or, at least, were replaceable by other institutions, especially the state as a provider of care. The effort to see sex differences as artificial led to the need to reinvent institutions to handle the difficulties of age difference.

These profound intellectual trends have affected how men and women view themselves and view children and childbearing. The logic of contract has culminated in a triumph of autonomy. The movement to conquer nature promotes greater gender equality as an exercise in autonomy. Institutions buckle things together, suggesting that they have a necessary or salutary relation to one another, and both these trends reflect the modern penchant for separating what institutions once united. Marriage and family life had, among other things, buckled love and marriage, marriage and parenthood, parenthood and sex, marriage and sex, and sex and procreation together. Every modern defender of some family form ends up defending, in one way or another, various connections among these goods; the more radical the critics of the family are, the more buckles they seek to loosen.

Today we face the possibility of the family’s end, in part because of the attractive promise to free us from the buckles that nature seems to place on our freedom. The erosion of these buckles explains, in no small part, the amazing decline in birth rates seen across the Western world. Encapsulating all of these separations in one fell swoop is the move for public recognition for same-sex marriage, as it is the victory of the adult-centered marriage contract to secure whatever goods the adults choose, and is the final detachment of marriage and family life from nature. The question is, then, what is to be done?


Scott Yenor is Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at Boise State University.  This article is drawn partly from his book Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought (February 2011).

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.