On Thursday, February 12, the city of San Francisco issued marriage licenses to and presided over marriage ceremonies for more than 50 homosexual couples.
On Thursday, February 12, the Massachusetts Legislature adjourned in exhaustion after struggling for two days to answer a seemingly simple question: What is marriage?
On Thursday, February 12, the precarious standing of marriage became absolutely clear.
Is marriage – as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared and San Francisco officials apparently believe – nothing more than an intimate sexual relationship between two consenting adults; a relationship with no rational connection to motherhood, fatherhood, child bearing or child rearing?
Or is it something more?
The answer, viewed from any historical, anthropological or sociological perspective, is quite clear. Marriage is more than an emotional and sexual attachment. Much more.
Giambattista Vico, after completing an exhaustive study of ancient history, concluded in 1725 that marriage between a man and a woman is an essential characteristic of civilization. Without strong social norms that encourage a man to direct his sexual attentions to a single woman and thereafter care for his offspring, Vico concluded that chaos ensued. Marriage, he wrote, was the “seedbed” of society.
British anthropologist J. D. Unwin reached the same conclusion some 200 years later. In his 1934 book, Sex and Culture, Unwin chronicled the historical decline of 86 different cultures. His exhaustive survey revealed that “strict marital monogamy” was central to social energy and growth. Indeed, no society flourished for more than three generations without it. Unwin stated it this way, “In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on prenuptial and postnuptial continence.”
In the 21st century, the findings of Vico and Unwin are confirmed by hundreds of sociological studies that document the impact of marital forms and marital dissolution on men, women and children. Those studies speak with a surprisingly uniform voice: enduring marriage between a man and a woman is the best environment for the social, physical, mental, emotional and economic development of men, women and children. Without stable marriage, women suffer, men suffer – and children suffer the most. Every deviation from the ideal model of enduring monogamous marriage between a man and a woman increases the suffering of men, women and children.
Marriage, therefore, is more than an intimate association between two people. It civilizes men. It protects children. It generates social energy. It fosters individual and collective growth. It teaches norms.
It creates culture.
But, on Thursday, February 12, the actions of state and local legislatures on both coasts demonstrated that marriage is in chaos.
Marriage must not become the victim of the confusion of Thursday, February 12. America must amend its Constitution to specify that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. This is the only sure way to restore order to this venerable and surpassingly important social institution.
And, unless order is soon restored to marriage, Giambattista Vico, J.D.Unwin and hundreds of social scientists have already documented what will happen to America beginning on Friday, February 13.
