 |
| Man/woman, exclusive, permanent marriage is still a beautiful public good |
His brief speech was organized with a lawyer’s mind, but with clarity for regular people. Most of his points are arguments I have made myself [see my Defense of Marriage collection], but I always
admire someone who finds yet clearer ways to tell the truth. So today I’m going
to just outline his speech, with occasional quotes.
The definition of marriage is necessary in the discussion:
Everyone in this room is in favor of marriage equality. The
only way we can know whether or not any given state law is treating marriage
equally or not is if we know what marriage is. Because every state law will
draw lines between what is a marriage and what isn’t a marriage. If we want
those lines to be drawn on principle, if we want those lines to be drawn on the
truth, we have to know what sort of a relationship a marriage is as compared to
other forms of consensual adult loving relationships.
He sets up the speech answering three questions:
•
What is marriage?
•
Why does marriage matter for public policy?
•
What are the consequences of redefining
marriage?
His
definition argument for defining marriage as the permanent commitment between a
man and a woman keys on the biological fact of offspring.
Whenever a child is born, a mother will
always be close by. That’s a fact of biology. The question for culture, and the
question for law is, Will a father be close by? And if so, for how long?
Marriage is the institution that different cultures and societies across time
and place developed to maximize the likelihood that that man commits to that
woman, and then the two of them take responsibility to raise that child.
He offers up just a sampling of social science data, of
which there is a mountain, that children are most likely to have best outcomes
when raised by a mother and a father—one of each gender, not interchangeable.
He quotes President Obama, showing this is not dismissible as a conservative
anachronism:
We know the statistics that children that grow up without a
father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine
times more likely to drop out of schools, and 20 times more likely to end up in
prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from
home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community
are weaker because of it.
So, if we start with the premise that procreating and
raising children are important to society, and that it is valuable to have the
mother and father who bring life to the child stay together to raise the child,
then public policy should, at the very least, not interfere with that preferred
condition, and would be better to encourage that condition.
He referred to the change in the out-of-wedlock birthrate
over the past 50 years (which I noted last week as well): “At one point in
America virtually every child was given the gift of a married mother and
father. Those numbers right now—more than 50% of Hispanic children are born
outside of wedlock; more than 70% of African-Americans are born outside of
wedlock. And the consequences for those children are really serious.” There’s
no way out of poverty without turning this trend around.
He uses the language of the opposition to address the
policy:
So everything that you can care about if you’re someone who
cares about social justice and limited government—if you care about freedom and
liberty and you care about the poor—is better served by having the state define
marriage correctly to ensure that men and women commit to each other and take
responsibility for their children, while then leaving other consenting adults
to live and to love how they choose, without redefining the institution—the
fundamental institution of marriage.
Much of the rest of the speech addresses the results of
redefining marriage, using not presupposition, but actual outcomes from changes
that have happened.
First is the reorientation of “the institution of marriage
away from the needs and rights of children and towards the desires of adults.” This point ties back in to the social science
argument: “If the biggest social problem we face right now in the United States
is absentee dads, how will we insist that fathers are essential when the law
redefines marriage to make fathers optional?” Redefining marriage would
multiply the likelihood of fatherless children.
Second concerns the three basic components of the
traditional definition: man/woman, exclusivity, and permanence. If you declare
these three attributes of marriage to be “irrational,” what do you replace them
with to delimit a definition?
He refers to three new words, invented to refer to sexual
relationship combinations that are claiming comparable value.
· Throuple—a
three-person couple. If you remove the importance of the one man and one woman
who come together to parent a child, then you remove the principle that limits
the number of participants in the “marriage,” without adding anything of value
to society.
· Wedlease—a
temporary arrangement, removing the permanence of the relationship that has
been of value to children, who take a long time to raise to adulthood.
· Monogamish—more or less retaining the two-person
marriage, but removing the exclusivity, so that sex with partners outside the
marriage is accepted as part of the marriage.
The third result of redefining marriage concerns liberty,
specifically religious liberty. He points out that in Massachusetts, in
Washington, DC, and in neighboring Illinois, Christian adoption agencies were
forced to stop offering their services.
These agencies said, We have no problem with same-sex couples
adopting from other agencies, but we only want to place our children with a
married mom and a dad. We have religious liberty interests. We also have social
science that suggests children do better with a married mom and a dad. In all
three jurisdictions they were told they could not do that.
Because of the redefinition of marriage, it became illegal
for anyone to purposely prefer to place orphans with a mother and father—the best
situation those innocent, voiceless unfortunate could have had.
Additionally, there have been court cases against
photographers, bakers, florists, and innkeepers—individuals who presumably
still have their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion—who are
coerced by activist judges to act against their conscience. In none of these
cases have the accused attempted to deprive the plaintiffs of services; they
have only reserved the right not to accept their business. Courts have ruled
that they can and should be deprived of their religious liberty and be forced
to take on business they find objectionable—or else close their businesses and
serve no one.
This coercion can only happen in a tyranny. If such cases
are allowed to stand, we no longer have Constitutional guarantees of freedom.
What we do not find is an example of a place where redefining
marriage has not resulted in loss of religious liberty. So those who argue, “That would never happen here,” are either lying or blinded.
So, what do we get if we redefine marriage? A small segment of
the population (of the approximately 3% of the population that is homosexual,
the even smaller percentage who choose to commit to one other person) can call
their romantic relationship equivalent to marriage, with no benefit to society
as a whole.
What is the cost? Fatherhood and motherhood are declared
irrelevant. Children are abandoned and left in poverty. People who for
religious or social science reasons value man/woman parenting, permanence, and
exclusivity are coerced by the brute force of government (not to mention a fair amount of media and peer bullying) to behave against
their beliefs. By any measure, it’s not a fair exchange.
Here is the video, if you’d like to hear the whole speech.
No comments:
Post a Comment