Call this part XVI in the series of answers to the question, “how will same-sex marriage affect your family or your heterosexual marriage?”.
The editors at National Review have published “The Case for Marriage,” and it’s a good treatment of some of the consequences of redefining marriage. It’s worth your time to read, but a few excerpts may whet your appetite.
On the facts of life; marriage is more than a feeling.
It is true that marriage is, in part, an emotional union, and it is also true that spouses often take care of each other and thereby reduce the caregiving burden on other people. But neither of these truths is the fundamental reason for marriage. The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children. If it did not produce children, neither society nor the government would have much reason, let alone a valid reason, to regulate people’s emotional unions ‘… Marriage exists, in other words, to solve a problem that arises from sex between men and women but not from sex between partners of the same gender: what to do about its generativity.
On the charge that one-man, one-woman marriage is “unfair” to those who identify as gay and lesbian.
The third objection is that it is unfair to same-sex couples to tie marriage to procreation, as the traditional conception of marriage does. Harm, if any, to the feelings of same-sex couples is unintentional: Marriage, and its tie to procreation, did not arise as a way of slighting them. (In the tradition we are defending, the conviction that marriage is the union of a man and a woman is logically prior to any judgment about the morality of homosexual relationships.)
On labeling those who want to give children both a mom and a dad.
Our culture already lays too much stress on marriage as an emotional union of adults and too little on it as the right environment for children. Same-sex marriage would not only sever the tie between marriage and procreation; it would, at least in our present cultural circumstances, place the law behind the proposition that believing that tie should exist is bigoted.
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Paul David Stanko
