By Ryan T. Anderson, Robert P. George & Sherif Girgis at National Review Online

At least President Obama is not dissembling anymore about his views on marriage. And even though we consider his support of redefining marriage a deep error, he has done the nation a favor by revealing the truth about his position. So did the vice president, days earlier, when he opined about “the simple proposition” that “this is all about” — “what all marriages, at their root, are about.” That is, the administration has created a long-awaited and much-needed platform for a national discussion of the core issue in the debate: What is marriage?

Consider two competing views:

THE HISTORIC VIEW
Marriage as a comprehensive union: Joining spouses in body as well as mind, it is begun by commitment and sealed by sexual intercourse. So completed in the acts by which new life is made, it is specially apt for and deepened by procreation, and calls for that broad sharing of domestic life uniquely fit for family life. Uniting spouses in these all-encompassing ways, it also calls for all-encompassing commitment: permanent and exclusive. Comprehensive union is valuable in itself, but its link to children’s welfare makes marriage a public good that the state should recognize, support, and in certain ways regulate. Call this the conjugal view of marriage.

THE REVISIONIST VIEW 
Marriage as the union of two people who commit to romantic partnership and domestic life: essentially an emotional union, merely enhanced by whatever sexual activity partners find agreeable. Such committed romantic unions are seen as valuable while emotion lasts. The state recognizes them because it has an interest in their stability, and in the needs of spouses and any children they choose to rear. Call this the revisionist view of marriage.

President Obama has made it clear that he favors the second view. He hasn’t offered any arguments for it, merely pointing to his feelings and those of his children.

In our forthcoming book, What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, we argue that the conjugal conception of marriage is not only the one long embodied in Western law and culture; it is also, by a sizable margin, rationally more defensible. President Obama and his allies can now join this discussion by backing their intuitions with arguments — if they can.

Now that the president has disclosed his view, he — like all revisionists — must confront some tough questions. And he, like they, will run into a problem. Something must set marriages as a class apart from other bonds. But on every point where most agree that marriage is different, the conjugal view has a coherent explanation — and the revisionist has none.

President Obama, like most, surely thinks that marriage is inherently a sexual union. But why must it be, if sex contributes to marriage only by fostering and expressing emotional intimacy? Non-sexual bonding activities can do that. Why can’t the tender platonic bond of two sisters be a deep emotional union, and therefore a marriage? Or, if marriage is primarily about the concrete legal benefits — of hospital visitation, or inheritance rights — should these benefits be denied two cohabiting sisters just because their bond can’t legally be sexual? To all this, the conjugal view has an answer.

Again, if marriage is essentially about emotions and shared domestic experience, why should it be limited to two people? Newsweek says the U.S. has half a million polyamorous households — where emotions and experiences are shared with multiple partners. Surely three people can be emotionally united, and some say that the variety of polyamory fulfills them as the consistency of monogamy can’t. So if marriage is about emotional fulfillment, why stop at two? The conjugal view has an answer.

Finally, if marriage is distinguished just by being a person’s deepest bond, her number one relationship, why should the state get involved at all in what basically amounts to the legal regulation of tenderness? The conjugal view has an answer. The revisionist has none.

Indeed, our recently candid president should note that the more candid, and consistent, revisionists have long accepted these points. Years ago, 300 prominent scholars and activists signed a statement arguing that we should recognize polyamorous and multiple-household sexual relationships. These activists agree that making sexual complementarity optional would make all its other norms arbitrary — and therefore unjust to leave intact. We only disagree on whether this top-to-bottom dismantling of the institution of marriage would be a good or a bad thing.

The president has now created a platform for this very discussion; and it is a discussion we look forward to having. For as Obama himself implied, this is not a dispute featuring “bigots” on one side, any more than it has “perverts” on the other. It is a debate of reasonable people of goodwill who disagree about the nature of the most basic unit of society. In saying that he supports letting states decide the definition of marriage for themselves, Obama indicated that this issue shouldn’t be settled by judicial fiat. On this, we agree. Our national conversation shouldn’t be brought to an undemocratically abrupt end. But as it continues, advocates on all sides must contend with, and answer, the central question in this debate, without which we can’t know thewhat or the why of legal recognition, much less what justice demands: What is marriage?

— Ryan T. Anderson is editor of Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, N.J. Robert P. George is McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. Sherif Girgis, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Princeton University and a law student at Yale, is a research scholar at the Witherspoon Institute.

Written by Ryan T. Anderson and Thomas Messner (Heritage.org)

On Wednesday afternoon, President Obama announced that he supports same-sex marriage. This was not exactly a surprise.

Sure, when running for Senate in 2004, Obama said that “marriage is between a man and a woman.” And when campaigning for the presidency in 2008, he restated that view and also claimed he did “not support gay marriage.”

The truth, however, is that President Obama has repeatedly done and said things that directly undermine marriage as one man and one woman.

President Obama has openly opposed state marriage amendments, such as Proposition 8 in California and the hugely successful amendment adopted by voters in North Carolina earlier this week. These amendments would protect marriage from judicial activism in state courts and let voters decide the question through democratic processes. But Obama views such measures as “divisive” and “discriminatory.”

President Obama also supports repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a federal law that defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman for purposes of federal law. And President Obama’s Justice Department has taken extraordinary steps to undermine DOMA in the courts, first by offering a soft defense and then by offering no defense at all.

These seeming inconsistencies led many to conclude that the President wasn’t really against gay marriage but was saying so for political reasons. Now, the President has finally owned up to what many people already suspected: that he supports same-sex marriage.

It is good that President Obama has decided to be more straightforward about what he really believes about marriage. The American public deserves at least that much.

But the President’s so-called “evolution” on the timeless institution of marriage marks an unfortunate turn. Society has a civilizational interest in promoting marital childbearing and the faithfulness of husbands and wives to each other and their children. Marriage is a vital social institution that promotes that interest.

The reason the state is in the marriage business in the first place is because sex makes babies and babies need mothers and fathers. As one source has put it, “but for children, there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex.” That “institution” is marriage, and it brings together men and women as husbands and wives to become fathers and mothers to any children their unions bring forth.

This binding together doesn’t happen by accident. Binding fathers to mothers and their children requires strong cultural and legal norms to channel adult sexual desire and behavior into an institution where childbearing leads to responsible childrearing.

Furthermore, undoubtedly one reason voters in 32 states have voted to protect marriage is the belief that, for children, the ideal situation is to have both a mother and a father. This belief is supported by social science, which demonstrates that children do best when reared by their married biological mothers and fathers. Mothering and fathering are not interchangeable phenomena. The ideal for children is love and attention from both a father and mother, as well as the role modeling that each can provide of masculinity and femininity.

By embracing same-sex marriage, President Obama has invited everyone in the nation to consider this basic issue: What is marriage? The President has sided with those who would redefine marriage by declaring that mothers and fathers are expendable and sexual complementarity does not matter. Under this view, marriage is whatever two consenting adults want it to be.

But once the President accepts these ideas, can he explain why marriage should involve only two people? Can he explain why, under his conception, childrearing would continue to have any meaningful relationship to marriage? Can he explain why commitments of permanence and sexual exclusivity should be the norm for marriage? Throw away the core meaning of marriage and these cherished norms logically go with it.

There is a truth about marriage, and most people intuitively grasp that it has something to with mothers and fathers, the offspring they bear through sexual union, and the mutual cooperation required to effectively rear offspring throughout many years of dependency. The marriage debate is about whether our laws will recognize and promote this truth or, rather, label it a falsehood and force society to fall in line.

President Obama has made clear where he stands on this issue. In the coming months, voting members of the American public will have the opportunity to do the same.

Written by Kevin DeYoung, The Gospel Coalition

On Wednesday afternoon, to no one’s surprise, President Obama revealed in an interview that after some “evolution” he has “concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.” This after the Vice-President came out last Sunday strongly in favor of gay marriage. Not coincidentally, the New York Times ran an article on Tuesday (an election day with a marriage amendment on one ballot) about how popular and not controversial gay television characters have become. In other words, everyone else has grown up so why don’t you? It can seem like the whole world is having a gay old time, with conservative Christians the only ones refusing to party.

The temptation, then, is for Christians go silent and give up the marriage fight: “It’s no use staying in this battle,” we think to ourselves. “We don’t have to change our personal position. We’ll keep speaking the truth and upholding the Bible in our churches, but getting worked up over gay marriage in the public square is counter productive. It’s a waste of time. It makes us look bad. It ruins our witness. And we’ve already lost. Time to throw in the towel.” I understand that temptation. It is an easier way. But I do not think it is the right way, the God glorifying way, or the way of love.

Here are five reasons Christians should continue to publicly and winsomely oppose bestowing the term and institution of marriage upon same-sex couples:

1. Every time the issue of gay marriage has been put to a vote by the people, the people have voted to uphold traditional marriage. Even in California. In fact, the amendment passed in North Carolina on Tuesday by a wider margin (61-39) than a similar measure passed six years ago in Virginia (57-42). The amendment passed in North Carolina, a swing state Obama carried in 2008, by 22 percentage points. We should not think that gay marriage in all the land is a foregone conclusion. To date 30 states have constitutionally defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

2. The promotion and legal recognition of homosexual unions is not in the interest of the common good. That may sound benighted, if not bigoted. But we must say it in love: codifying the indistinguishability of gender will not make for the “peace of the city.” It rubs against the grain of the universe, and when you rub against the grain of divine design you’re bound to get splinters. Or worse. The society which says sex is up to your own definition and the family unit is utterly fungible is not a society that serves its children, its women, or its own long term well being.

3. Marriage is not simply the term we use to describe those relationships most precious to us. The word means something and has meant something throughout history. Marriage is more than a union of hearts and minds. It involves a union of bodies–and not bodies in any old way we please, as if giving your cousin a wet willy in the ear makes you married. Marriage, to quote one set of scholars, is a” comprehensive union of two sexually complementary persons who seal (consummate or complete) their relationship by the generative act—by the kind of activity that is by its nature fulfilled by the conception of a child. So marriage itself is oriented to and fulfilled by the bearing, rearing, and education of children.” This conjugal view of marriage states in complex language what would have been a truism until a couple generations ago. Marriage is what children (can) come from. Where that element is not present (at the level of sheer design and function, even if not always in fulfillment), marriage is not a reality. We should not concede that “gay marriage” is really marriage. What’s more, as Christians we understand that the great mystery of marriage can never be captured between a relationship of Christ and Christ or church and church.

4. Allowing for the legalization of gay marriage further normalizes what was until very recently, and still should be, considered deviant behavior. While it’s true that politics is downstream from culture, it’s also true that law is one of the tributaries contributing to culture. In our age of hyper-tolerance we try to avoid stigmas, but stigmas can be an expression of common grace. Who knows how many stupid sinful things I’ve been kept from doing because I knew my peers and my community would deem it shameful. Our cultural elites may never consider homosexuality shameful, but amendments that define marriage as one man and one woman serve a noble end by defining what is as what ought to be. We do not help each other in the fight for holiness when we allow for righteousness to look increasingly strange and sin to look increasingly normal.

5. We are naive if we think a laissez faire compromise would be enjoyed by all if only the conservative Christians would stop being so dogmatic. The next step after giving up the marriage fight is not a happy millennium of everyone everywhere doing marriage in his own way. The step after surrender is conquest. I’m not suggesting heterosexuals would no longer be able to get married. What I am suggesting is that the cultural pressure will not stop with allowing for some “marriages” to be homosexual. It will keep mounting until allaccept and finally celebrate that homosexuality is one of Diversity’s great gifts. The goal is not for different expressions of marriage, but for the elimination of definitions altogether. Capitulating on gay marriage may feel like giving up an inch in bad law to gain a mile in good will. But the reality will be far different. For as in all of the devil’s bargains, the good will doesn’t last nearly so long as the law.