At this point, some revisionists abandon the philosophical project of attacking the conjugal conception of marriage and simply ask, "what's the harm?" Even if we are right, is implementing our view important enough to justify the emotional and other difficulties that some may experience as a result of being denied recognition of the sexual partnerships they have formed? Why should the state care about some abstract moral principle?
Revisionists often capture this point with a question: "How would gay marriage affect you or your marriage?"29 It is worth noting, first, that this question could be turned back on revisionists who oppose legally recognizing, for example, polyamorous unions: How would doing so affect anyone else's marriage? If this kind of question is decisive against the conjugal view's constraints on which unions to recognize, it cuts equally against the revisionist's. In fact it undermines neither since, as even many revisionists implicitly agree, public institutions like civil marriage have wide and deep effects on our culture - which in turn affects others' lives and choices.
Thus, supporters of the conjugal view often respond to this challenge - rightly, we believe - that abolishing the conjugal conception of marriage would weaken the social institution of marriage, obscure the value of opposite-sex parenting as an ideal, and threaten moral and religious freedom. Here is a sketch of how.
No one deliberates or acts in a vacuum. We all take cues (including cues as to what marriage is and what it requires of us) from cultural norms, which are shaped in part by the law. Indeed, revisionists themselves implicitly concede this point. Why else would they be dissatisfied with civil unions for samesex couples? Like us, they understand that the state's favored conception of marriage matters because it affects society's understanding of that institution.
In redefining marriage, the law would teach that marriage is fundamentally about adults' emotional unions, not bodily union30 or children,31 with which marital norms are tightly intertwined.32 Since emotions can be inconstant, viewing marriage essentially as an emotional union would tend to increase marital instability - and it would blur the distinct value of friendship, which is a union of hearts and minds.33 Moreover, and more importantly, because there is no reason that primarily emotional unions any more than ordinary friendships in general should be permanent, exclusive, or limited to two,34 these norms of marriage would make less and less sense. Less able to understand the rationale for these marital norms, people would feel less bound to live by them. And less able to understand the value of marriage itself as a certain kind of union, even apart from the value of its emotional satisfactions, people would increasingly fail to see the intrinsic reasons they have for marrying35 or staying with a spouse absent consistently strong feeling.
In other words, a mistaken marriage policy tends to distort people's understanding of the kind of relationship that spouses are to form and sustain. And that likely erodes people's adherence to marital norms that are essential to the common good. As University of Calgary philosopher Elizabeth Brake, who supports legal recognition of relationships of any size, gender composition, and allocation of responsibilities, affirms, "marriage does not simply allow access to legal entitlements; it also allows partners to signal the importance of their relationship and to invoke social pressures on commitment."36
Of course, marriage policy could go bad - and already has - in many ways. Many of today's public opponents of the revisionist view - for example, Maggie Gallagher, David Blankenhorn, the U.S. Catholic bishops - also opposed other legal changes detrimental to the conjugal conception of marriage.37 We are focusing here on the issue of same-sex unions, not because it alone matters, but because it is the focus of a live debate whose results have wide implications for reforms to strengthen our marriage culture. Yes, social and legal developments have already worn the ties that bind spouses to something beyond themselves and thus more securely to each other. But recognizing same-sex unions would mean cutting the last remaining threads. After all, underlying people's adherence to the marital norms already in decline are the deep (if implicit) connections in their minds between marriage, bodily union, and children. Enshrining the revisionist view would not just wear down but tear out this foundation, and with it any basis for reversing other recent trends and restoring the many social benefits of a healthy marriage culture.
Those benefits redound to children and spouses alike. Because children fare best on most indicators of health and wellbeing when reared by their wedded biological parents,38 the further erosion of marital norms would adversely affect children, forcing the state to play a larger role in their health, education, and formation more generally.39 As for the adults, those in the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of society would be hit the hardest.40 But adults more generally would be harmed insofar as the weakening of social expectations supporting marriage would make it harder for them to abide by marital norms.
As we have seen in Part I.B, legally enshrining conjugal marriage socially reinforces the idea that the union of husband and wife is (as a rule and ideal) the most appropriate environment for the bearing and rearing of children - an ideal whose value is strongly corroborated by the best available social science.41 Note, moreover, that the need for adoption where the ideal is practically impossible is no argument for redefining civil marriage, a unified legal structure of incentives meant precisely to reinforce the ideal socially and practically - to minimize the need for alternative, case-by-case provisions.
If same-sex partnerships were recognized as marriages, however, that ideal would be abolished from our law: no civil institution would any longer reinforce the notion that children need both a mother and father; that men and women on average bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise; and that boys and girls need and tend to benefit from fathers and mothers in different ways.
In that case, to the extent that some continued to regard marriage as crucially linked to children, the message would be sent that a household of two women or two men is, as a rule, just as appropriate a context for childrearing, so that it does not matter (even as a rule) whether children are reared by both their mother and their father, or by a parent of each sex at all.
On the other hand, to the extent that the connection between marriage and parenting is obscured more generally, as we think it would be eventually,42 no kind of arrangement would be proposed as an ideal.
But the currency of either view would significantly weaken the extent to which the social institution of marriage provided social pressures and incentives for husbands to remain with their wives and children. And to the extent that children were not reared by both parents, they would be prone to suffer in the ways identified by social science.43
Because the state's value-neutrality on this question (of the proper contours and norms of marriage) is impossible if there is to be any marriage law at all, abolishing the conjugal understanding of marriage would imply that committed same-sex and oppositesex romantic unions are equivalently real marriages. The state would thus be forced to view conjugal-marriage supporters as bigots who make groundless and invidious distinctions. In ways that have been catalogued by Marc Stern of the American Jewish Committee and by many other defenders of the rights of conscience, this would undermine religious freedom and the rights of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children.44
Already, we have seen antidiscrimination laws wielded as weapons against those who cannot, in good conscience, accept the revisionist understanding of sexuality and marriage: In Massachusetts, Catholic Charities was forced to give up its adoption services rather than, against its principles, place children with same-sex couples.45 In California, a U.S. District Court held that a student's religious speech against homosexual acts could be banned by his school as injurious remarks that "intrude[s] upon the work of the schools or on the rights of other students."46 And again in Massachusetts, a Court of Appeals ruled that a public school may teach children that homosexual relations are morally good despite the objections of parents who disagree.47
The proposition that support for the conjugal conception of marriage is nothing more than a form of bigotry has become so deeply entrenched among marriage revisionists that a Washington Post feature story48 drew denunciations and cries of journalistic bias for even implying that one conjugal-marriage advocate was "sane" and "thoughtful." Outraged readers compared the profile to a hypothetical puff piece on a Ku Klux Klan member.49 A New York Times columnist has called proponents of conjugal marriage "bigots," even singling an author of this Article out by name.50 Meanwhile, organizations advocating the legal redefinition of marriage label themselves as being for "human rights" and against "hate."51 The implications are clear: if marriage is legally redefined, believing what every human society once believed about marriage - namely, that it is a male-female union - will increasingly be regarded as evidence of moral insanity, malice, prejudice, injustice, and hatred.
These points are not offered as arguments for accepting the conjugal view of marriage. If our viewpoint is wrong, then the state could be justified in sometimes requiring others to treat same-sex and opposite-sex romantic unions alike, and private citizens could be justified in sometimes marginalizing the opposing view as noxious. Rather, given our arguments about what marriage actually is,52 these are important warnings about the consequences of enshrining a seriously unsound conception of marriage. These considerations should motivate people who accept the conjugal view but have trouble seeing the effects of abolishing it from the law.
In short, marriage should command our attention and energy more than many other moral causes because so many dimensions of the common good are damaged if the moral truth about marriage is obscured. For the same reason, bypassing the current debate by abolishing marriage law entirely would be imprudent in the extreme. Almost no society that has left us a trace of itself has done without some regulation of sexual relationships. As we show in Part I.E.1 (and the data cited in Part I.B.2 suggest), the wellbeing of children gives us powerful prudential reasons to recognize and protect marriage legally.
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D. If Not Same-Sex Couples...
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