MARRIAGE AND CHILDREN: Michael Sierk replies to Mark Barton

[Michael Sierk is a postdoctoral researcher in biochemistry at the University of Virginia.]

It seems to me that Mark Barton is granting the premise of Stanley Kurtz's
argument in his piece on marriage in Scandinavia when he says, "What is [Elizabeth Marquardt's] talk about making marriage a 'norm' if not a hankering for social if not legal pressure to get married? And if I thought she had the slightest hope of success at making marriage back into a licence to have sex, I'm sure I'd be glad to be excluded. As it happens, I'm asking for marriage as it actually is, in 2004, not as Elizabeth would like it to be."

That is, that gay marriage would not be possible if the connections between sex, childrearing, and marriage had not been significantly weakened already. That being the case, all of Barton's detailed arguments about how same-sex couples are really the same as opposite-sex ones notwithstanding, it seems that it is inevitable that gay marriage can only further weaken those connections. At best it could have minimal effect, but there is no way that it could actually strengthen them, as some claim.
posted by Eve at 2:58 PM | link

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