A consistent refrain of my critics is that marriage is an irreducibly legal institution, and yet on that point we are in complete agreement. If marriage was merely personal or religious, we would be free to define it in accordance with whatever arbitrary sentiments or convictions we might find congenial. But the need for a principled argument exists for the very reason that we are engaging the law. Before we address the question of the "legal rights" entailed by marriage, we need to be clear about what the law accepts as marriage.
The point can be drawn out of the letter of Katherine Willis '07, who asserts that marriage is about "legal rights, sometimes about children, but also involving inheritance, property, tax status and employment benefits." The logic of that contention is somewhat backwards, as legal benefits are the incidents of a marriage, not the other way around. Benefits are conferred because we deem them to be suited for the arrangements that fit the definition of the institution. "Marriage" is not merely the title for a class of legal benefits or another form of government largesse. Even if we were to remove those privileges from a marriage, the question of same-sex unions would hardly recede.
So the matter of legal benefits only redirects us to the original question of what constitutes a marriage. The disposition of my skeptics has been to attempt to detach marriage from sexuality altogether, substituting love or commitment as the basis for the institution. And yet, if there were no human sexuality, if humans reproduced asexually, then there would be no marriage. Marriage and sexuality are inextricable, and we find in a marriage an expression of love and commitment only because we recognize that human beings are species distinctly capable of recognizing the enduring moral worth of a sexual partner and expressing that recognition in a sexual act. Monogamy, as my critics remind us, is not natural, and marriage is a social and legal institution that provides a morally suitable (monogamous, among other things) framework for the begetting and rearing of children. The love and commitment of parents to their children and to one another is only a component of that framework.
Marriage, then, is the instrument by which sexuality and its natural telos of begetting are made to reflect society's moral understandings about what shapes a family. And so, once again, the argument demands an understanding of what constitutes human sexuality. While I find no wrong inherent in the act of sodomy (either heterosexual or homosexual), sodomy is not sex. Strictly speaking, sodomy reduces merely to a form of assisted masturbation. There is only one "sexuality" in the most finite sense of the word.
The nearly unanimous retort of my critics is that marriage, then, must preclude the union of a sterile couple or of a couple that plans not to conceive children. But the notion of marriage and the sexual coupling have a natural correspondence, the correspondence embodied in the act of begetting. The significance of unifying bodies that is reflected in marriage corresponds with the fact that children literally embody the combination of the attributes of both parents, or the "wedding" of the two partners in their child. The marital communion is consummated and actualized sexually, whether or not the acts result in children. Homosexual acts, by their very nature, cannot be "marital." Same-sex partners are physically incapable of marriage, as only one man and one woman can become "one flesh." None of that necessitates the actual production of offspring.
Whether or not you think this argument is valid, there is no question that the proponents of same-sex marriage would detach marriage's meaning from this natural significance and refuse to privilege the procreative relationship. Unsurprisingly, from the abundance of criticism directed at my argument, no other coherent scheme by which marriage can be limited to couples has emerged. Once we allow homosexual couples to wed, we are left with no principle by which to deny a marriage to a polygamous ensemble (among many other novel arrangements). Traditional marriage has been confined to two people because marriage has always drawn upon human sexuality for its coherence and definition.
In the same way that not all marital sex need be procreative, not all marriages must entail children. It was suggested by Emily Stark '04 that my argument reflected an aversion to homosexuals raising children, but adoption by homosexuals is irrelevant in the argument over marriage. Children are often raised in arrangements outside of marriage, as there are many manifestations of legal guardianship for which marriage is not a prerequisite. I would not state categorically that gay couples should never be allowed to assume the care of a child because I don't find anything incompatible between the nature of homosexuality and the responsibilities of child rearing. Whether a person is capable of raising a child should turn on attributes of his character, not on his "sexual orientation."
But the argument will have to turn on whether homosexuals are able to assume the responsibilities that the natural parents of the child are incapable of assuming. Underlying the entire controversy is the ineffaceable fact that homosexual couples can never produce children and would therefore need to adopt in order to raise them. Therein lies the incongruity between homosexuality and marriage.
Finally, as for the observation of Ennis Parker '99 that my previous article resembled both the substance and tone of a Hadley Arkes lecture, I could only be flattered that a critic would find both the content and presentation of my argument to be reminiscent of one of America's pre-eminent conservative academics. But that Parker's immediate reflex is to attribute this construction of marriage exclusively to our redoubtable professor serves to demonstrate the animating point of my initial article: Amherst students, generally speaking, are underexposed to and have a concomitantly poor understanding of conservative thought.
When crafting the original column, I drew on the work of, among others, Arkes, Robert George, Bill Bennett and Maggie Gallagher, while informing the presentation with my own sense of which parts of the logical progression stand as most critical. Yet my suspicion is that Parker's only previous exposure to the argument was in an Arkes' lecture, inclining him to consider and dismiss it as the dogmatic doctrine of a single academic. This construction of marriage is no more the distinct property of Arkes than are any of the responses to my column that Parker offered in his letter which was the unique product of his own deliberation. The decisive difference, however, is that in Parker's rejoinders, there is nothing I have not heard countless times before.
In that vein, the purpose of my articles, ultimately, was to erode the novelty of the argument so that its underlying principle, as opposed to accusations of bigotry and vitriol, might be associated generally with the opposition to gay marriage. At least in that, I venture to hope, I have succeeded.