Defining Marriage

In this thorough post, Alastair Roberts provides a thoughtful exposition of the implications of gay marriage on society, and how the discussion of that subject should be broached.  While somewhat lengthy, I commend the whole of the post to you.

Here are a few quotes that stood out in particular from my reading, with notations from the various article headings.

From The Public Nature of Heterosexual Marriage

The connection of heterosexual intercourse with procreation renders the existence of a sexual relationship between heterosexual partners a matter of public significance. The public recognition and celebration of the sexual character of the relationship between a married couple needs to be regarded in this light. Apart from gossip, prurient interest, and perhaps understanding the surface dynamics of relationships in which the partners are involved, why should society have an interest in the private act of sexual union that occurs between a couple? Why should the occurrence of this private sexual union be regarded as so important to the public recognition of the relationship that public recognition can frequently be withdrawn or denied in its absence? Precisely because the most private act of heterosexual marital union is an act which has potential consequences that are inescapably public.

From The Shifting Ethos of Marriage

Unlike traditional marriage, homosexual relationships are almost entirely oriented towards the present desires and emotions of the parties within the relationships. In contrast to the place of intercourse in marriage, which involves openness to the future gift of life and to all that that entails, the sexual intercourse in homosexual relationships is invariably and necessarily sterile and detached from the future. There is a significant disconnect and indeed tension to be observed between homosexual patterns of relationship and the notion that marriage involves making potentially costly sacrifices, limiting one’s pleasure, and forging lifelong commitments that may run radically contrary to the desires of both parties in the future. Such a notion only makes sense within a relationship that is structured in a manner that primarily serves the needs of people beyond the two partners.

Gay marriage accomplishes no movement from one generation to another. The union more or less terminates on the desires, emotions, and needs of the two partners. To establish gay marriage would be to institutionalize the close personal relationship model of marriage, which would hasten the rot of traditional marriage values. In particular, it would encourage the removal or compromising of those aspects of marriage culture and law that orient the union towards the needs of children, and others beyond the marriage partners. For those who enter into marriage as something that is about little more than the satisfaction of their desires and the public recognition of an emotional bond that they have with another person, the values of traditional marriage will be regarded as constricting….

It would be naïve to think that the gay rights movement, having achieved the status of marriage, will make peace with its traditional virtues of lifelong faithfulness and exclusiveness. The idea of marriage as an institution, with values, expectations, and requirements that transcend individuals is generally contrary to the gay marriage ideal and so the institution of marriage will be attacked, even while the privileges and honour accorded to its status are being enjoyed.

From The Breaking of Natural Bonds

If only on account of the differences between male and female sexuality, gay marriage will fuel attempts to undermine the necessity of fidelity and monogamy, and to push for easier and less costly divorce. This will weaken marriage for everyone; as history has shown, removing legal any other impediments to divorce hastens the collapse of marriages. Such a shift of values is very concerning….

Homosexual marriage does not provide for the natural bond between children and their biological parents. Perhaps the most significant consequence of this development will be the gradual detachment of children from their biological parents. As the conception of sex within marriage is increasingly conformed to the norm of an essentially sterile act, private and unregulated, shorn of responsibility or consequences, and marriage and the family come to be viewed as primarily legal constructs, the bond between marital sex and the family will come under threat in various ways.

From Homosexual Marriage and Tyranny

Gay marriage has been propagated chiefly by means of litigation and political pressure. Once we appreciate the manner in which gay marriage advocates seek to deny the normativity and superiority of the natural bonds enshrined in marriage, to claim as their right the same privileges that heterosexual married couples enjoy from the hand of nature, and to replace the normativity of a blood relations understanding of family with an understanding of family as a legal construct, we should be extremely worried. One requires some fairly big guns to wage the war against nature, which is one reason – though not, as we shall see, the only one – why sexual liberation from the natural order goes hand in hand with tyranny. Gay marriage can’t render itself public in the natural way that heterosexual marriage can, and so it must use the law and the state in order to achieve this….

Once the state has determined that a sexual relationship between a same sex couple is completely equal to a sexual relationship between an opposite sex couple, and ought not merely to be tolerated, but to be celebrated and privileged to exactly the same degree, where do we draw the line regarding the degree to which political agitators and litigious minorities can impose their vision upon society? When the state gives so little attention to the immense weight of millennia of tradition throughout human cultures and the order of nature in asserting the will of a vocal group upon society, we should all fear for our freedoms. When the state has arrogated to itself the right to define marriage and the family as it pleases, apart from reference to natural forms that it must recognize and uphold, have we not arrived at a position where the state regards society purely as its own creation, and thus subject to its domination, rather than as involving inviolable bonds and forms that pre-exist it?

If, rather than the laws surrounding marriage and family being ways to protect the substantive realities of blood relationships, marriage and family increasingly come to be regarded as legal constructs, detached from such underlying reality, the state gains increasing control over children and marriage is pushed into the private realm. Once we accept the normativity of a sterile understanding of sex, and a model of family increasingly detached from blood relationship, the state gains incredible power to reorder human society. As the recognition of the bonds connecting parents with their children are weakened, we give the state an ever-growing capacity to intervene in the upbringing of our children. When sex is no longer conceived of or engaged in as responsible behaviour that is open to potential consequences that may exert their effects for a very long period of time, any consequences that do arise will tend to become the responsibility of some other party, almost invariably the state. Where marriage and sexual intercourse within it are not entered into with a commitment to or expectation that one should be expected to shoulder the responsibilities attending conception and child-rearing, children will gradually come to be treated as if they were primarily wards of the state.

Gay marriages do not produce children, yet children are essential for the implementation of the vision of those who wish to maintain the equality of homosexual unions to heterosexual marriages. Homosexuals need access to children, both as badges that demonstrate the fact that their unions are completely equal to heterosexual marriages, and also as means by which to shape the society of the future. As homosexual relationships do not produce children, they must gain access to children by other means. The strong bond of blood that exists between parents and their children is a threat to homosexuals, as it limits their access to the next generation. Consequently lengths must be undertaken to undermine and weaken this bond.

State intervention is the primary means by which gay marriage advocates have pushed their agenda. In addition to using the power of government and the law to force people to accept their unions, government and the law are used to limit the rights of agencies and individuals to discriminate against them when it comes to such things as adoption. Gay marriage advocates won’t be satisfied with the fact that many adoption agencies will be happy to place children with gay couples; they must press to ensure that no agency can operate on the belief that a heterosexual married couple can offer things to a child that a homosexual couple never could. The powers of the legal system and the police powers of the State will be marshaled against any who might act on such a conviction. Convictions that arise from deep within our engagement with the world, our personal histories, and our cultural and human traditions are incredibly hard to eradicate. The belief that it is natural for a child to have a mother and a father, and that any departure from this norm is undesirable and not to be encouraged is one such belief.

The power of a belief is directly proportional to the degree of force and intrusive social engineering required to deprogramme it, which is why the doctrines of modern egalitarianism, feminism, and gay rights have needed to throw such great weight behind a movement of oppressive political correctness. Political correctness cannot easily tolerate and respect the existence of vocal public opposition. The more contrary to commonsense and natural reason a particular view is, the more rigorously its proponents will have to suppress any opposition. Permit the opposition clear public expression of its convictions and it is rendered vulnerable and exposed. The gay marriage position involves several claims that run strongly counter to commonsense – the parity of homoerotic desire and heteroerotic desire, the equality of homosexual forms of intercourse to penile-vaginal intercourse, the disconnection of sex from reproduction, the interchangeability of men and women, the dispensability of the roles of husband, wife, father, and mother, the family as primarily a legal construct, rather than a bond of blood, etc. For this reason, political intimidation, government propaganda, militant litigation, smear campaigns, vicious attempts to discredit opposition, and attacks on academic and press freedom have been and will always be primary weapons in the armoury of gay marriage advocates. All criticism or voicing of opinion that displeases the gay lobby can be labeled as intolerant and homophobic, and anyone who dares voice public opposition can expect to be targeted and hounded out of public office, academic respectability, or have their voice silenced by the media.

Although gay rights advocates can undoubtedly point to the manner in which the power of the state has been wielded against them in the past, my point here is that there is, by the very nature of things, a close natural alliance and affinity between soft totalitarianism and a movement that denies so forcefully convictions that have underlain human societies for most of history, and which relies upon government and the law to render itself public. The same natural alliance and affinity with oppressive state power does not exists in the case of heterosexual marriage.

Government and the law are also used as means to indoctrinate the youth. People that naturally have no children will seek to wrest control over the children of others in order to shape society according to their vision. It is for this reason that homosexuals who have no children of their own have an extremely high interest and desire to shape the education of other’s people children, and to limit the rights of parents to remove them from the desired indoctrination. It should not be a surprise to us that those who stand most opposed to the traditional structures surrounding reproduction in our society will often be the parties that invest the most effort in seeking to shape and control the education of our children and almost always the ones who are most in favour of limiting the control that parents have over their children’s curricula.

It has long been recognized that a strong family is the primary basis for a free society. However, a strong family is the greatest threat to the achievement of equality for homosexual relationships. Although it trumpets itself as a movement for sexual liberation, the gay marriage movement – and the gay rights movement more generally – will, by the very nature of the agenda that it seeks to advance, be one of the most powerful driving forces towards totalitarianism. Through state education and other means governments have already gone far in the direction of weakening the natural bond between children and parents in order to strengthen its grip on public society. Gay rights advocates provide governments with a natural and invaluable ally in this struggle against the natural bonds of the family, pushing towards the position when all children are regarded as essentially wards of the state…

The movement towards gay marriage is one of the movements within our society that is most antithetical to liberty. For this reason alone it must be firmly opposed. If homosexuals are to be the friends of liberty, they must recognize and submit to the extreme limitations that their refusal to engage in traditional marriage places upon their ability to form society and shape the minds of the future, to recognize that, by their very character, recognized or not, their relationships are largely powerless in the public realm. Of course, the naturally unenfranchised character of homosexual relationships will condemn homosexuals to a marginal and alienated status when compared to married couples (those of us who are single find ourselves in a similarly disadvantaged position, probably even more disadvantaged in certain respects).

From Conclusion

Society as a whole grows out of the union between a man and a woman. On account of its significance to society, and its preservation and deepening of natural bonds, this relationship should be encouraged and protected and set apart from all other forms of sexual relationship. Homosexual marriage is a state-sponsored parody of the real thing. While homosexuals must be accorded respect and dignity to no less of a degree than married persons, as a parody of the natural order of things, homosexual marriage merits not merely our political and social resistance, but also our moral repugnance and revulsion. For this reason, we must resist it without compromise, and firmly discriminate in favour of heterosexual marital union. On this upholding of this discrimination hangs much of our freedom.