The following article from Touchstone Magazine’s blog sets forth 10 arguments that depend upon “common sense, history, and logic.”  While written by someone who is a Christian, he is purposeful in arguing from outside Scripture proper.  Any or all of these arguments need more time in our current modern conversation on the meaning of “marriage.”

SANITY & MATRIMONY

Ten Arguments in Defense of Marriage, by Anthony Esolen

Most people believe that the principal objections, or even the only objections, to the drive to legalize homosexual “marriage” spring from religious faith. But that is not true. I can offer ten objections that have nothing to do with any religion at all, except insofar as the great religions of the world reflect the nature of mankind. In this essay, I present the first six of these objections; in a follow-up, I will present the remaining four.

These objections spring from three sources. The first is a commonsense observation of man—his needs, his shortcomings, and his aspirations. The second is history: our own recent history, and the history of those who once committed the mistakes we are committing now. The last is logic.

The objections should make everyone uncomfortable, both those who call themselves conservative and are busy destroying the heritage of Western civilization, and those who call themselves liberal and are busy curtailing and denying every freedom but that of the zipper.

Chaos Unleashed

1. The legalization of homosexual pseudogamy would enshrine the sexual revolution in law.Forty years ago, popular singers urged us to open our hearts to love, meaning a free and easy practice of sexual intercourse, without what were called “hang-ups.” Modesty was decried as prudishness, and chastity ridiculed as impossible or hypocritical. Experimentation abounded: so-called open marriages, public intercourse, intercourse under the influence of drugs.

A few of the experiments fizzled out, though they are now resurging, as witness the sewer of websites devoted to “swingers.” The pornography explosion, given new life by the Internet, shows no sign of abating. In what they discuss and in the salaciousness of their photos, the magazines women buy at the grocery store are as salacious as anything put out by Hugh Hefner in the 1950s.

What honest observer of our situation dares to argue that the results have not been disastrous? We were told that the legalization of abortion would lead, paradoxically, to fewer abortions and fewer instances of child abuse. Instead, it led to far more abortions than even the opponents ever imagined, and it so cheapened infant life that child abuse spiked sharply upward. No one any longer is surprised to hear, on local television, of a child chained to his bed and allowed to starve in his own filth, or a baby bludgeoned to death by a boyfriend, with the mother as accomplice.

We were told that the legalization of contraceptive drugs would lead to fewer unwanted children, and fewer children born out of wedlock. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the human race should have known otherwise. By reducing the perceived risk of pregnancy, contraception removed from the young woman the most powerful natural weapon in her arsenal against male sexual aggression. She no longer had any pressing reason not to accede to the boyfriend’s wishes. So she agreed; and we now have two of five children born out of wedlock.

The sexual chaos has touched every family in the nation. Who does not know at least one family whose children require an essay merely to describe who under their roof is related to whom, and how?

Some reckon up the losses from this revolution by percentages: of unwed mothers, of aborted pregnancies, of children growing up without a parent, usually the father. It will take artists of the most penetrating insight to reckon up the losses as they ought to be reckoned, in human misery.

Chasms Unbridged

2. It would enshrine in law the principle that sexual intercourse is a matter of personal fulfillment, with which the society has nothing to do.  It is hard for us to imagine, in a world of mass entertainment and its homogenization of peoples, how central an event marriage is in every culture. It marks the most joyful celebration of a people, who see their renewal in the vows made by the young man and the young woman. For although marriage focuses upon the couple, it does so because they embody a rejuvenation in which everyone, young and old, male and female, takes part.

In his Epithalamion, the English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser summons everyone to the celebration of his wedding—and after the priest has “knit the knot that ever shall remain,” and the revelers have splashed themselves and the groom’s walls with wine, and the girls have danced and the boys have run shouting up and down the street, and the hours of celebration have been hastened along in glee, he bids everyone to leave him and his bride alone. They enjoy each other’s love, and pray that from their “timely seed” they may raise a large posterity.

Here we have an understanding of marriage infinitely deeper than the meager expression of will we are now left with. This understanding sees that marriage bridges two chasms that must be bridged, lest the culture wither away, and the people separate one from another, into a suspicious privacy.

One chasm is that which divides the generations. At the true wedding, the elders know that the future belongs to the couple, who in their love that night will, in turn, raise up another generation. Sexual intercourse is the act by which we renew mankind. We celebrate the wedding because it betokens our survival, our hope for those to come after us.

But we could not have children without the bridge thrown over the more dangerous divide, that which separates two groups of human beings who seldom understand one another, whose bodies and psyches are so markedly different; who try to love one another, and so often fail, yet who try again for all that.

I mean men and women. The wedding is a symbol of the union of differences. The very word sex derives from Latin sexus, denoting that which separates. It is a mark of our degeneracy that the ugly term “having sex” has come to mean the marital act, with the once delicate term “making love” similarly demoted. What man and woman do in the marriage bed is not “have” sex; the sex, that is, the separation, they are provided with already. What they do is unite, across the separation.

And unless man and woman unite, the culture cannot survive. The women will split away to protect their persons and their relatively few children; the unattached males will pass the dull hours in destruction.