FAMILY MATTERS: Douglas Kmiec

Neither law nor politics provides a readily accessible vocabulary on the question of same-sex marriage. For example, the legal concept of equal protection of the law is not self-defining. To know whether it applies to same-sex marriage, it's first necessary to know whether gays and nongays can similarly produce the individual and social good associated with marriage. ...

Gay couples tend to be childless, and even when surrogacy or adoption provides children, they are deprived of the mutually supportive and complementary perspectives of mother and father. Although it isn't required of every husband and wife, marriage cannot be separated from procreation and the development of a child's character within a stable family. The prosperity of the American republic, and civilizations before it, has depended on families for this vital instruction. It is irreplaceable. ...

More than a century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that "certainly no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony." The court has never wavered from this definition even in its modern jurisprudence. Yes, the court, in Lawrence vs. Texas (2003), did invalidate a criminal prohibition of homosexual sodomy. But that ruling in no way endorsed the practice or same-sex marriage; rather, it simply recognized privacy and the limits of the law.

Principles anchored in privacy are insufficient to determine the public and consequential legal definition of marriage. Marriage at its best is both self- and other-regarding, considerate toward family and the civic community of which it is a part. By comparison, same-sex relationships are largely self-regarding. Gay partners may derive pleasure from such relationships. But because they are not open to new life, they cannot fulfill the duties and obligations long expected of marriage.

Before the mayor of San Francisco illegally issued same-sex marriage licenses, only four judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had the temerity to assert that the possibility of begetting children was not at the heart of the marital estate. These activist judges not only defied millenniums of history but also ignored the words of the Supreme Court in Lawrence, that it would "demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse."

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posted by Eve at 6:24 PM | link

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