Tuesday's decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declaring one-man, one-woman marriage unconstitutional in that state raises all kinds of questions.
Is it wrong, for instance, to exclude gays from the marital bond?
Focus on the Family CitizenLink Associate Editor Pete Winn discussed some of the questions and issues with Glenn T. Stanton, senior analyst for marriage and sexuality at Focus on the Family and coauthor of "Why Marriage Matters."
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Q. Glenn, homosexual activists have long said, "How does my ability to marry a homosexual partner impact your straight marriages in any way?" How do we answer that?
A. That is really more of an argument than it is an honest question. If marriage was truly a private affair that impacted nobody outside the couple themselves, then, yes, that question would be valid. But that is a very shallow understanding and a very uninformed understanding of the nature of marriage, because marriage is just as much — if not more so — about the community as it is about the couple themselves.
But it's not the community that gets married.
No, it's not the community that gets married, but it's the community that enforces marriage and develops marriage. We need to understand that marriage is just as much a social norm — a social ideal — of the kind of behavior that we expect and need for a healthy vibrant society; as much as it is about the emotional commitment of two people.
One of the biggest issues is the social role of marriage. Marriage domesticates men. Men who are not attached permanently to a woman are men that will practice and engage in socially unhealthy behaviors at a much higher level.
But why can't we say that gay "marriage" will socialize men?
Because men don't socialize other men. Women socialize men. And we find that not just in contemporary society, but in all human civilizations, that women as women demand certain things of men, require certain things of men, and that shapes them and molds them in some very important pro-social ways. That's found in early anthropological records and it's also found by current contemporary sociology. A man married to a woman is a much different social being than a man either cohabiting with a woman or a man who has just very close male relationships.
So that if same-sex marriage actually becomes a reality — and the norm for some — what are the implications for marriage?
Marriage becomes reduced down to nothing, because the moral argument for same-sex marriage is the same moral argument for group marriage, for polygamy, and it is going to be impossible to deny polygamous groups — and group marriage people — who come forth in all sincerity and say, "If you can't restrict marriage to only couples of opposite sex, then you can't restrict marriage to only two people." They are all very much interwoven.
The three things that you lose are: 1) the domesticating influence of marriage on men, which I already discussed; 2) the protective influence of marriage upon women from being victimized and objectified by men; and 3) it provides mothers and fathers for children.
When monogamy is lost as an ideal, the idea that a man should commit himself and forego all other sexual relationships but (the one with) his wife, then women become commodities to be used and collected by men. When committing yourself to a woman and subjugating your sexual desires for the sake of that woman — when that becomes just one lifestyle choice among many, it is devastating to a culture.
Same-sex "marriage" also denies every child it touches access to either a mother or father. It is never compassionate to intentionally deny a child either a mother or father.
In fact, there is a binary nature — a kind of "yin and yang" — to sexuality, isn't there?
There is. You know, if you take a pill, it does something in your body and there's something called the "active ingredient" that really makes the difference — that really makes things happen. In marriage, the union of the male and female is the active ingredient.
That's true for every known human civilization. It is the act of bringing together male and female in permanent relationships — to cooperate together, to build a domestic life together, to build an emotional life together and to raise their common children. That's what marriage really does.
The reason why it works is that males and females are incomplete human beings by themselves, and by coming together, they complete one another. Not just for procreation but emotionally, intellectually, creatively, intuitively — in all kinds of ways.
The procreative is obvious. But to get at all the other issues, think about a workplace that only contains women. And think about a workplace that only has men. While procreation is not a part of the daily work life, and you can take that off the table, you can still see that there are things that males and females do differently — the way that they act and interact, the way that they view the world and interact with the world — that are essential.
When you bring men and women together, you get a fuller picture, you get a fuller "whole" than what you would get from excluding either of the sexes.
And that is exactly what's at stake with same-sex "marriage" — it essentially says that what men and women bring to the table as unique males or females, isn't all that important.
Let's talk about the arguments that were raised by the Massachusetts decision. We'll start with the main one they presented: Equality demands that you allow homosexuals to marry; otherwise you're discriminating against them. Well?
Well, equality is the issue. Current marriage law treats everybody equally. We do not ban people from marrying based on sexual orientation. But we do have some criteria. You can't marry someone in your close family. You have to marry an adult. You can't marry someone who's already married. And you have to marry somebody of the opposite sex. Now, we don't ask people if they meet all those criteria —"Oh, by the way are you homosexual?" and if they answer, "Yes," then we deny them marriage. Marriage treats homosexuals the same. We don't care what their orientation is. We only care whether they meet the basic criteria.
But what the push for same-sex "marriage" is about isn't fairness or equality — it's about redefinition and destroying marriage itself. It's about redefining marriage to be something that it has never really been in any other civilization — and really can't be and still retain any meaning for the word.
In fact, marriage has really only meant one thing throughout all history — the permanent bonding of the two parts of humanity — male and female.
So that if we redefine it, it stops being marriage?
If we redefine it, it stops being anything meaningful, and it becomes anything we want it to be — which means, really, it becomes nothing.
Now the Massachusetts court said that civil marriage is whatever the state says it is. In fact, the justices took the Christian "three strands" analogy — that a man and woman join together with Christ's presence to constitute a marriage; only they secularized it to say that a marriage is any two persons who come together and are joined by the state. What about that?
The state has an interest in civil marriage, and civil marriage is a creation of the state. However, marriage is not a creation of the state. Marriage transcends the state. Marriage transcends the Church. God incorporated it into humanity, and that's why we find it showing up in all human civilizations — even those without an established state, or without an established church.
That does raise the question, though: Is marriage merely a civil/legal institution, or is it essentially a spiritual institution?
It is all of those, and it is everything. It is simultaneously all of those things. And it needs to be. And that speaks to the fundamental nature of marriage and the transcendent nature of marriage — that it touches every part of our human life. So we can't say that it's merely a religious institution, or merely a legal arrangement or merely a sociological institution. It is all of those things together.
The Massachusetts court also compared restricting same-sex "marriage" to laws that state laws that once barred interracial marriage.
There are two things that need to be understood here. What this is rooted in is the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967, which struck down state bans on interracial marriage.
That ruling from the Supreme Court affirmed marriage, rather than redefined marriage. It said that any male had a right to marry any female. What it did not do is redefine marriage. We did not have to redefine marriage to breakdown the barriers that had been wrongfully imposed upon marriage.
Besides, those bans were firmly rooted in racism. There was no compelling reason to keep that from happening. The definition of marriage to male and female is absolutely not rooted in homophobia and bigotry -- it's absolutely rooted in sociological fact: that male and female need each other, and that children need their mothers and fathers married so that we can be sure that they are there to participate in raising them.
So Glenn, bottom line — what's your biggest fear if gay "marriage" should come to pass and be legalized?
My biggest fear is that women, men and children will be hurt. Because we will be trying to act as if something that we are not made for — something we are not wired for — is just fine and glorious. We have seen a lot of tinkering with the family over the last 40 years. We've seen abortion, no-fault divorce, cohabitation, single-parenting by choice — and every one of those moves away form the ideal of marriage have not enhanced human well-being in any way. They have deeply hurt every measure of human well-being. They've deeply hurt human beings. So, that is my concern — that we would simply be contributing to that in a more dramatic way.
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