Forces pushing for genderless marriage are a wellspring of fallacies and unanswered questions about the consequences. Let’s explore some of them.
1. What’s love got to do with it?
Nothing. Romanticizing this debate by claiming that any two people in love should have a civil right to civil marriage is a foolish distraction. Neither judges nor legislators have any business discussing “affection” as a factor in defining civil marriage. Clergy who bless marriages have a legitimate and separate role in discerning the internal dynamics of couples. But not the state.
2. What is the state’s interest in marriage?
First, to recognize the union that produces the state’s citizens. Second, to encourage those who sire and bear the citizens to take responsibility for rearing them together. That’s all, folks. Proponents of genderless marriage often answer this question with non sequiturs such as property rights (irrelevant), civil rights (extraneous to the question), and “love and stability” (not a function of state involvement).
3. Why should state interest in marriage be about children if not all marriages produce children?
It’s thoroughly irrelevant that many heterosexual couples lack children because of intent, infertility, age, or health. Claiming that this is relevant to the case for genderless marriage suggests the “fallacy of composition”: inferring that something must be true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. Citizens of the state can exist only through the female-male union, no matter how the union occurs — whether traditionally, artificially, or in a petri dish. That’s the only fact that provides any grounds for state interest in marriage.
4. What about marriage for the sake of same-sex households with children?
We just don’t have the right to deliberately deprive children of knowing their biological mothers or fathers. But genderless marriage ultimately requires us to do this. It requires society to sanction the refashioning of familial bonds in alienating and experimental ways. Use of surrogates and egg or sperm markets put children at ever-increasing risk of being treated more as commodities than as human beings. Laws supporting genderless marriage cannot help but ramp up these trends to newer and crueler levels.
Read more:
American Thinker, April 6, 2013.
Stella Morabito has published several op-eds on same-sex marriage in The Washington Examiner.
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