Redefine marriage, make government bigger

LifeSiteNews ^ | 4-18-13 | Ryan T. Anderson

[ReformationFan]

Amid all the emotion over same-sex marriage, the limited-government argument for marriage as uniting a man and a woman keeps getting short shrift. It fell to me to make that case during a discussion of marriage law and the Supreme Court with the worthy S.E. Cupp on a recent installment of “Real News from The Blaze,” and I’d like to flesh out those thoughts here.

For starters, virtually every political community has regulated male-female sexual relationships. This is not because government cares about romance as such. Government recognizes male-female sexual relationships because these alone produce new human beings.

For highly dependent infants, there is no path to physical, moral, and cultural maturity—no path to personal responsibility—without a long, delicate process of ongoing care and supervision to which mothers and fathers bring unique gifts. Unless children mature, they never will become healthy, upright, productive members of society.

Marriage exists to make men and women responsible to each other and to any children that they might have.

Marriage is thus a personal relationship that serves a public purpose in a political community. As the late sociologist James Q. Wilson wrote, “Marriage is a socially arranged solution for the problem of getting people to stay together and care for children that the mere desire for children, and the sex that makes children possible, does not solve.”

The late atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell echoed the sentiment: “But for children, there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex,” he wrote. “t is through children alone that sexual relations become of importance to society, and worthy to be taken cognizance of by a legal institution.”

[ansel12]

For starters, virtually every political community has regulated male-female sexual relationships

Greece, Rome, the Apache, every society has to know what marriage is, and form laws dealing with it.

[hulagirl]

Finally a cogent, coherent, conservative argument for traditional marriage. Too bad we can’t get it out there to Hollywood and all the other culture shaping venues.

[Tax-chick]

all citizens have the right to live and love as they choose

Really? From what source does this right proceed?

Does a citizen have the right to live and "love" (ahem) with a sibling? With multiple "spouses"? With 10-year-old boys?

We need a more specific political vocabulary. "Right" is being used to mean too many different things, many of them pernicious. We also need to stop using "love" when we mean "copulate" or "sodomize."