CULTURE

How Same-Sex Marriage

Makes Orphans of Us All
The ideology that denies the meaningfulness of biological ties for human identity
is called same-sex marriage.

In a thoughtful essay ten years ago (Family History), New York

University philosophy professor David Velleman indicted both the
practice of creating children intending to sever them from their
biological parents, and the excuses adults offer to justify this.
The new ideology of the family is needed . . . for cases in which people
wanting to parent a child cause one to be conceived with donated
gametes. That this child cannot be parented by one or both of its biological
parents is not a disadvantage that its custodial parents volunteer to
mitigate; it was a desideratum that guided them in creating the child, to
begin with. Not being attached to a partner with whom they could be
fertile, they needed a child who was correlatively unattached, a child
already disowned by at least one of its biological parents. Rather than
adopt a child whose ties to its biological parents had been ruptured after
conception, they intentionally created one for whom those ties were
ruptured antecedently. This choice would be morally problematic if
biological ties were genuinely meaningful. Hence the need for an ideology
that denies their meaning.

The ideology denying the meaningfulness of biological ties for human

identity is called same-sex marriage.

The Biotechnical Revolution and the Isolated Child

There is a biotechnical revolution upon us that treats children as
products to manufacture. In the United States and around the
civilized world, individuals flip through catalogues or search online
to purchase sperm and eggs from (usually anonymous) donors whose

genetic characteristics they find appealing. These shoppers then hire

lab technicians to create embryos for implanting in a womb, often of a
leased surrogate, for purchaser retrieval after gestation completes.
Thereby do these people manipulate children

Commercially
arranged
marital love, in which adults intend to
reproduction also
deprive them of relationship with or
abolishes the
knowledge of at least one, and perhaps both,
togetherness of
of their biological parents, as well as their
mother and father
extended kin.
in the act
This practice of human reproduction without culminating in the
relationship, of reproduction arranged by
childs origins.
into existence in a manner divorced from

commercial transaction with service providers, graphically instantiates

the precepts of same-sex marriage ideology. By eliminating the
husband-wife marital norm, that ideology sunders even the conceptual
connection of the marital union and fertility.
Commercially arranged reproduction also abolishes the togetherness
of mother and father in the act culminating in the childs origins.
Indeed, in theory (and ordinary practice) the mother and father are
strangers to each other. A typical case involves individuals who sell
their gametes intending to never know or be known by their children
or co-parent. So also with another alien to the marital relationship: the
surrogate; her womb is not understood as a natural component within
the relational complex of marriage and motherhood, but as a
utilitarian machine to be leased and exploited by those with the
economic advantage to do so and the wish to summon a child into
being for their custody.

Its going to be
heartbreaking for
him to grow up and
realize he hasnt
got a mummy,

Elton John having obtained his kids this way,

he recently (and vehemently) defended this
commodification of persons. But his
comments from a few years ago reveal a
different perspective. His sons life initiated

Elton John said.

when a lab tech combined the sperm of Sir

Elton or his partner with a donor womans egg. The boy gestated in yet
another woman, a surrogate in California, who relinquished him upon
birth.
Its going to be heartbreaking for him to grow up and realize he hasnt
got a mummy, John stated. (The boy does have a mummy; its just that
her exile was the principle aim of his purchase contract.) Sir Eltons
transitionfrom acknowledging the loss he imposed upon his son to
stridently defending the manufacturing model of child-creation and all
it entailsis an anecdotal exemplar of the move logically required of a
society that redefines marriage to make the husband-wife relation
irrelevant to its composition.

Vive la Diffrence Versus Egalitarian Dehumanizing

The Supreme Court in the not-too-distant past observed: Physical
differences between men and women are enduring: [T]he two sexes
are not fungible; a community made up exclusively of one is different
from a community composed of both. Well, yes. One might think such
self-evident truths remain publicly relevant, but it is now anyones
guess whether the Court is about to make that truth illegal for states to
acknowledge and act upon.
The defining feature of the historic marriage

To obliterate the
sexual-difference
of its non-fungible constituents. To obliterate
feature of marriage
the sexual-difference feature of marriage is
is a radical
not a charitable expansion of its borders, but
repudiation of its
a radical repudiation both of its character
character and,
and, ominously, of the character of the
ominously, of the
human person it acknowledges and protects.
character of the
The change in civilization that stipulates
human person it
marriage as sexually undifferentiated, that
acknowledges and
denies the deep human relevance of being
protects.
community, after all, is the sexual difference

male and female in relationship, necessarily entails redefining parent.

For if marriage is to be the egalitarian institution of adult rights now

insisted, rather than a relation founded in sexual difference and childregard, the requirements of equality mean (although this implicates
an enormous irony) that same-sex couples get to have and raise kids,
too.
But couples of the same sex dont and cant do anything procreative
within their relationship. So by redefining marriage, the law must
make some other moves, too: among which is valorizing the
technological and other innovative takes on parenthood, equalizing
their status with that of the natural-relational process. That means the
law must ratify as normativenot tragic or exceptionalboth adoption
and the technological production of children from gametes and bodies
gathered from outside the partners union. In such case, the law denies
(among other things) that childrens identity is, in any sense that could
be legally prioritized, as the natural issue of the joining of their mother
and father. Therein lies the acute alteration to the governing
anthropology required of societies adopting same-sex marriage.
So not only does same-sex marriage ideology redefine parent, but also
child. For on its account, a child comes into the world not naturally
related to anyone, but only transactionally connected to the persons
responsible for fetching him through various means. No child in a
same-sex household derives from the relationship of the partners in
that home; every such child has been torn from at least one parent.
Rather than a childs dissociation from parents being a tragedy, it is a
necessity and design feature of the same-sex regime.

By redefining
marriage, the law
must make some
other moves, among
which is valorizing
the technological
and other

The same-sex ideology, then, presents an

unsettling logic that forbids us to even know
that an orphans condition as an orphan is
something to mourn. This nouveau
anthropology presents children as, in
principle, individuals as such, with no
natural relation to or necessary identity
bound up in their biological mother and

innovative takes on father.

parenthood.

If that truthfully describes their identity, then

their continuing detachment from biological parents is trivial. And

their assignment to homes (foster, adoptive, or orphanage) is not
something we properly may classify as a deviation. In fact, it might be
the most enlightened sort of condition for children, as it more vividly
incarnates their liberation from assumptions insensible except in
terms of the now-renounced marriage model that assigns childrens
identity and place with their mother and father.
Same-sex marriage is not just an upheaval in rules. It changes the
structure of interpretation. It forbids us to know things we used to be
allowed to take for granted.

Legal Archetypes and the Social Order

How a society knows and remembers is a function of its cultural and
legal institutions and the performances associated with them, which
sustain mores and structures of conceptual plausibility. Upon altering
or abolishing the legal mechanisms that convey the central cultural
narratives, and replacing them with different models, we remap the
authorized pathways of thought for the community. In shaping an
institution like marriage, public authorities work by defining the realm
of cognitive possibility for individuals as much as through external
policing, Nancy Cott writes.
In discussing torture, philosopher and law professor Jeremy Waldron
has focused on the function of archetypes in our law. He asserts that
the prohibition on torture is just such an archetype, emblematic of
our determination to break the connection between law and brutality
and to reinforce its commitment to human dignity even when law is at
is most forceful and its subjects are at their most vulnerable. If we
discard the torture ban, much more is inevitably relinquished with it;
other concepts unravel that were previously held together by that
bright line. Waldron explains:

the life of the law depends, in large part, on argumentation. . . . In law, we

dont just argue pragmatically for what we think is the best result; we
argue by analogy with results already established, or we argue for general
propositions on the basis of existing decisions that already appear to
embody them.

Once an archetype is removed from law, the principles the archetype

embodied and held in place have lost their authority as conceptual
polestars. Thus our ability to make [effective] arguments of a certain
kind vanishes. Conversely, those ideas that the archetype classified
beyond the pale are now loosed to overhaul the affected area of law in
terms of their rival precepts. [T]he demise of an archetype sends a
powerful message about a change in the character of the relevant law.
If, in the name of equality, the Supreme

Once an archetype
is removed from
national mandate for de-sexed marriage, it is
law, the principles
unclear how the Court thereafter could avoid
the archetype
cleansing its own caselaw of its unequal
embodied and held
preferential treatment of biological parents.
in place have lost
Or how Congress in the exercise of its
their authority as
Fourteenth Amendment Section Five
conceptual
enforcement authority wont be within its
polestars.
Court this summer constitutionalizes a

rights to banish from state domestic relations

law those policies based on biological bond favoritism or that

otherwise imply a legally cognizable significance to kinship relations. A
ruling that traditional marriage law is illegal invites an avalanche.
Former Chief Justice Warren Burger observed that in constitutional
adjudication some steps, which, when taken were thought to approach
the verge, have become the platform for yet further steps. A certain
momentum develops in constitutional theory and it can be a downhill
thrust easily set in motion but difficult to retard or stop. Indeed,
history itself (as Michael Hanby writes) might be conceived of as the
train of cause and effect set in motion by our deeds but escaping our
control.

Same-Sex Marriage Denies the Natural Family

The refusal to countenance the sexual difference of male and female
that is central to the marriage relation implicates more than the roster
of who will be called married. Replacing the laws acknowledgement
of the essential significance of kinship and man-woman
complementarity with contingent preference and egalitarian artifice
means the government denies the pre-political and natural dimension
of the family that until now authorized its substantial immunity from
statist interventions.

State laws that

preserve the
marriage archetype
are a commitment
to the truth of
human identity.

That denial is on full display, for instance, in

recent judicial and legislative manipulation
of birth certificate entries to register names
of two persons of the same sex, or of three or
more persons. This innovation purports to
defer to individual (adult) autonomy, but its
darker and more basic meaning is that our

government handlers are not constrained by anything, transcendent or

created, that would narrow their jurisdiction to meddle, divide, and
isolate.
Our safety, prerogatives, and relational integrity remain secure in
proportion to our intelligent efforts to maintain and defend them.
These efforts include preserving public esteem for the beliefs that
undergird such conditions, which in turn require cooperative cues in
legal and social ecology. But the libertine modern man is bereft of this
insight. He stupidly assumes our civilization is just there, like the air we
breathe, rather than being a fragile accomplishment from centuries of
purposive toil, imperiled upon neglect of its preconditions.
State laws that preserve the marriage archetype are a commitment to
the truth of human identity. It is deceptive to describe that venerable
legal standard or its supporters as manifesting animus or psychoses
rather than a perfectly correct awareness that the public order and the
plight of the vulnerable are profoundly at stake in this policy

installation. The conserving reflex derives from a discerning sensibility

that manifestly eludes its belligerent critics.
The Supreme Court now stands poised to preempt legislative flexibility
and tolock into constitutional cement a radical cultural innovation
before our society has had anything resembling a discussion
commensurate with the gravity of the proposed transformation.
Should the Court carry through with it anyway, it will be shameful
though unsurprising. Haste and folly are regular companions.
Jeff Shafer serves as senior counsel at Alliance Defending
Freedom. He has litigated public-interest and First
Amendment cases in federal and state trial and appellate
courts throughout the United States.