The "gay marriage" controversy
Traditionalists need to get a clue - we lost this fight 40 years ago

Yesterday I set of a firestorm of commentary relating to my post on separating the legal and the spiritual in the wedding business. Justin Katz, for example, accused me of "killing marriage," others either insinuated or said that I would open the door to legalizing all kinds of relationships, such as father-daughter unions, polygamy, etc.

Everyone needs to calm down and take a deep breath and consider the deeper issues behind the whole controversy. The walls of traditional marriage were breached 40 years ago; what we are witnessing now is the storming of the last bastion.

Marriage is primarily a social institution, not primarily a religious institution. That is, marriage is a universal phenomenon of human cultures in all times and places, regardless of the religion of the people concerned, and has taken the same basic form in all those cultures. Marriage existed long before Father Abraham, Jesus or any other religious figure. The institution of marriage is literally prehistoric.

The three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) actually recognize this explicitly in their holy writings. The book of Genesis ascribes the foundation of marriage in the very acts of God himself in the creation of the world. Two examples:

"It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him" (Gen. 2:18) and "a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Gen. 2:24).

The three great religions base their definition of marriage on these verses and others which echo them in other particular Scriptures. In Christian theological terms, the definition of marriage is part of the natural law of the creation; therefore, the definition may not be changed by human will except in peril to the health of human community.

Psycho-biologists argue that marriage evolved in prehistoric ages because males are fundamentally driven by nature itself to ensure guaranteed paternity of offspring and women to ensure a steady supply of man-acquired resources for the nurture and protection of her children. I wrote about this in some length in June 2002, but here's the crux:

In evolutionary terms, marriage developed as the means by which women could guarantee to a specific man that the children she bore were his. In biological terms, men can sire hundreds of children in their lives, but this biological ability is limited by the fact that no one woman can keep pace. Siring kids by multiple women is the only way men can achieve high levels of reproduction, but women also have an extreme interest in the process, too.

There is no adaptive/survival advantage for women in bearing children by men who are simply trying to sire as many children as possible. During the latter stages of pregnancy, women are disabled to some significant degree - perhaps not for office work, but certainly for food gathering and for protecting or caring for their other children. For a single mother, as our own culture's experience shows, child-raising is a resource-intensive, years-long business. Doing it alone is a marked adaptive disadvantage for single mothers and their children.

So the economics of sex evolved into a win-win deal: women agree to give men exclusive sexual rights and guaranteed paternity in exchange for their sexual loyalty and enduring assistance with child bearing and child raising. For the man, this arrangement lessens the number of potential children he can sire (although it can still be up to a dozen, at least), but it ensures that his kids are, well, his kids, not another man's. (In folk lore and literature, the cuckolded husband is one of the most pathetic figures there is). The only way women could guarantee paternity was to remain chaste until she and a man had agreed to this arrangement. For the woman, the man's promise of sexual loyalty to her meant that he would expend his labor and resources supporting her children, not another woman's.

What weddings did was make legitimate the sexual conduct of a particular male and female under the guidance, nurture and if necessary, sanction, of the greater community. As Scott Harris argued in a series of comments, marriage

... is a biological relationship created solely for the purpose of the survival of the species. ... marriage predates religion and government, and is entirely independent of them. . . .

The significance of marriage is the explicit commitment of the representative of one family to the representative of another family to voluntarily join their families together for the express purpose of the perpetuation of the two families. When a child is born into the marriage, the two families cease to be distinct biological entities. They "become one."

The interest of religion in this relationship is to reinforce and support that commitment and to teach skills and values which sustain the commitment, and pass those values on to new generations. The government's interest is in coercively enforcing the contractual obligations of such a commitment.

Other long-term intimate relationships, e.g. business partnerships do not qualify for the benefits and protections of marriage because they do not ... provide children.

What has always been at stake in the institution of marriage is the coming into being of the next generation, and that is surely a matter of much greater than merely private concern. Yet the government can merely encourage, not guarantee, that men and women will bring forth their replacements. Marriage as conventionally defined is still the ordinary practice in Europe, yet the birth rate in most of Europe is now less than the replacement rate, which will have all sorts of dire consequences for its future in many ways.

Today, though, sexual intercourse is delinked from procreation. Since the invention of the Pill about 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex-pregnancy-marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward pre-marital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the last four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that men's sexual and emotional commitment to them isn't reliably gained by giving men sex before marriage.

Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43 percent since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the dominant way men and women begin their relationships, not courtship and marriage. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together.

It is this fact, and its widespread social acceptance, that is actually impelling the move toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual relations "without benefit of clergy," as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but in fact the dominant lifestyle in the under 30 demographic within the last few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities - that is, have sex without sex's results - the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt. When society decided - and we have decided, this fight is over - that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular males and females, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has been thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce and the removal of social sanction for divorce, and talk in 2004 of "saving marriage" is pretty specious. There's practically nothing there left to save. Men and women today wo have successful, enduring marriages 'til death does them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.

If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?

Now, before your reach for pixelated brickbats, let me point out that I do believe that this state of affairs is indeed contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that gay marriage, if it ever comes about (and it will) will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye" (Matt 7:3-5).

There were two other lethal arrows into the heart of traditional marriage that I'll recognize here. One was socio-commercial feminism, which encouraged women on the one hand to postpone or pass up marriage and childbearing in order to have careers outside the home, and on the other hand to be as sexually active as they imagined men to be.

The other was the rise to pre-eminence in academia of post-liberal Christian theology and Bible scholarship, which has intentionally sought to free society from the Bible rather than help lead it to follow it. Massive numbers of papers and books have been written since the mid-twentieth century attempting to show that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are patriarchal, oppressive documents that tell less the story of humanity's struggle with its relationship with the divine, than they are the record of proto-Marxist class and gender struggles of power, exploitation and domination. So today, anyone who expects an orthodox biblical argument to be taken seriously is living in dreamland. Couple these philosophies with the Pill, and traditional marriage in its holistic social context didn't have a chance of survival.

Update: Next post: Next steps for traditionalists

by Donald Sensing, 2/17/2004 12:55:11 PM. Permalink |