Making the Case for Marriage

His ideas on the matter have been, as he put it, “evolving.” While stumping around the country, candidate Obama said that although he approved of civil unions for gays, he believed that marriage was reserved for heterosexuals.

Scarcely more than two years later, President Obama announced that his administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).* In a statement released to the press, the attorney general made the point that the President’s decision came after “careful consideration” of the law’s constitutionality. Given the timeframe for his turnabout, it would appear that Obama’s ideas on the matter have undergone a revolutionary change, rather than an evolutionary one.

The president’s foray into the affairs of the judicial branch included deciding that laws involving sexual orientation should be subject to “heightened scrutiny” -- the level of judicial review applied to legislation affecting ethnic and racial minorities. In Obama’s “evolved” understanding, DOMA not only fails that standard, but also reflects animus toward gays and lesbians.

The validity of the President’s judgment hinges on what marriage is and what purpose it serves. Is marriage a fluid convention socially constructed to satisfy a culture’s felt needs and desires? Is it a religious institution foisted on civilization to promote sectarian values? Or is it something intrinsic to our human design, something that fulfills, in a way that nothing else can, a universal human longing and essential social function?

Christian teaching aside, some valuable insights come from the ancient Greeks. They were folks who understood a thing or two about sexuality, things that many moderns have overlooked or ignored.

Lessons from antiquity

According to Greek mythology, the Amazons were a warrior class of women that lived in a unisex civilization. To sustain their all-female culture, the warrior-femmes descended upon neighboring tribes once a year for sexual relations with men. Nine months later, the Amazons kept the female babies and discarded the male ones. Aegean mythmakers knew that for their story to remain credible, their fantastical race needed the opposite sex.

The people of yore recognized that heterosexuality is as fundamental to civilization as gravity is to the universe. Without gravity, the stars would vaporize into the cosmic expanse; without heterosexuality, the human race would go extinct after one generation. Thus, while their musty stories bespoke of cultures in which homosexuality was socially accepted and prevalent, the ancients never suggested that marriage was anything but a heterosexual institution.

In a mystical and real way, when a man and woman join sexually, they become “one” physically, biologically, and genetically. No other union can unite two people so completely and complementarily. What’s more, researchers have recently found that during sex a “bonding hormone” is released that induces the man and the woman (to a greater degree) to attach to each other emotionally. Their holistic connection is shared by the offspring it produces.

Every child has a biological mother and father. Because of that intimate, organic bond, children deserve a stable, nurturing relationship with their biological parents – a relationship that is best served in marriage. For that reason, the solution to dysfunctional marriages and failed marriages is not redefinition and novel family structures, but strengthening the institution against corrupting influences.

An oxymoron

Throughout history, various societies have allowed the marriage of multiple partners (polygamy), close kin, or children. But without exception, all have upheld marriage exclusively as heterosexual, and not out of animus toward gays. Many past cultures had no moral proscriptions against homosexuality and some, like ancient Greece, even considered pederasty (man-boy love) a social good or, at least, a moral “no-never-mind.”

No, the ancients understood that the social capital of civilization depends on the family -- the basic unit of society that begins when a man and woman become “one” and stay one through the bonds of matrimony.

Because of the social purpose that marriage uniquely serves, the ancients, while extolling the exploits of homosexual cultures -- the Boeotians, Spartans, and Cretans -- would have considered gay “marriage” something of an oxymoron, which is precisely what it is. To understand why, consider the chemical compound salt.

The production of salt (NaCl) is consummated by the chemical union of one sodium (Na) atom and one chlorine (Cl) atom. Marriage is consummated by the physical union of one man and one woman. In both cases, it is the complementary design of the constituent parts that make the thing what it is. Two sodium atoms or two chlorine atoms, do not salt make. And two men or two women, does not marriage make.

It is argued that if same-sex couples aren’t marriageable for reproductive reasons, neither are sterile or elderly couples. But marriage, like humanness, is based on design, not function. A human being is no less a human being because of defect, disease, stage of development, or stage of decline. In the same way, a marriage is no less a marriage if, because of age or infertility, a man and woman cannot have children. Although their union is incapable of fulfilling a primary marital function, it conforms to the marital design and essence.

A civil right?

It is regularly claimed, with heart-felt passion, that everyone has the right -- the civil right -- to marry whomever they love. Skipping over the obvious problems of not qualifying “they” by age, numbers, and kinship, the strategy to ride on the coattails of the civil rights movement is an offense to black Americans. And it has been rightly criticized by leaders in the black community.

One is Bishop Andrew Merritt, who had this to say: "We find the gay community's attempt to tie their pursuit of special rights based on their behavior to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s abhorrent." His sentiment is justified.

During the “separate but equal” days, American blacks were legally denied equal access to housing, employment, education, and public accommodations. By contrast, gays and lesbians enjoy freedoms and protections that were only dreamt of by segregation-era blacks. Arthur Johnson, the black pastor of St. Luke's Ministries, put it this way: “I have never seen any homosexuals who had to go to the back of the bus because they're homosexual.” Even Jesse Jackson, who is ready to find a civil rights offense in any circumstance, points out: "Gays were never called three-fifths human in the Constitution."

Today, everyone, regardless of race, color, ethnicity, or sexual orientation is guaranteed equal protection and due process under the law. What’s more, contrary to the opinion of the president and attorney general, DOMA is not discriminatory with respect to sexual orientation -- it applies equally to those of any sexual orientation. For example, two straight spinsters who want to marry for financial and insurance benefits are prohibited from doing so, just as are two lesbians.

More importantly, “sexual orientation” is just that: an orientation; that is, a desire, preference, inclination, or impulse for a certain form of sexual expression. And, as for all human affinities and proclivities, sexual orientation is an unsettled product of nature and nurture. Yet even if sexual orientation is 100 percent hard-wired by our genes, orientation only influences behaviors, it does not determine them -- unless we accept free will as an illusion, and ourselves as bags of chemicals fatalistically governed by the laws of physics and chemistry.

But what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If the genetic argument -- the “God made me this way” plea -- is sufficient to create a protected class of citizens based on sexual orientation, it is sufficient to do the same regardless of the orientation in question, be it pederasty, pedophilia, polygyny, polyandry, bestiality, or incest, not to mention those that aren’t sexual in nature.

The outlook

Obama’s decision to shirk the duty of his office in upholding federal law raises legitimate questions about his leadership. But as a number of pro-marriage pundits see it, his stand down on DOMA could result, ironically enough, in its galvanization.

Maggie Gallagher, founder of the National Organization for Marriage, remarked that with the weak legal defense offered by the Obama Justice department to date, she was stumped on how to mount a vigorous defense of DOMA in the courts. But now that Obama has stepped down and the pro-marriage Congress has stepped up, Gallagher predicts, “Our chances of winning a great victory for marriage at the Supreme Court just shot way up.”

Given that the bid for same-sex “marriage” has been defeated in every state where it has been put to a popular vote, and the recent decision against gay “marriage” in Maryland, a state where redefining the institution had been considered a “done deal,” DOMA is on solid ground. The case for traditional marriage has always been strong; it only needs to be made consistently, winsomely, and unflinchingly.

* DOMA defines “marriage,” for federal purposes, as the legal union between one man and one woman. It was passed under the Clinton administration with wide bipartisan support in 1996.