Maggie Gallagher keeps stating the obvious, but is anyone listening?
Women are people who, when we have sex, sometimes create new life. This truth deeply colors relations between men and women — even men and women who never have children together, indeed, men and women who never have sex together. Men impregnate, women are not impregnable. A society which tries to deny these facts ends up doing great and lasting damage to its own children, and to both men and women.
The movement to redefine marriage runs off the rails because its success necessarily depends on redefining gender and ignoring the basic facts of nature. Gallagher looks at the marriage fight that began in the 1960s.
Five great strands of contemporary liberalism — the sexual revolution, the gender-role revolution, the expansion of welfare for the poor, the movement for racial equality, and the environmental movement — came together to support de-norming of marriage, knocking it off its pedestal and de-legitimating, in various ways, its privileged cultural postion.
So where’s the harm in extending marriage to any two people who share a bed?
I learned this truth: Connecting sex, babies, love, money, and mothers and fathers is hard.
Hard at the individual level, and hard at the societal level. A society where marriage is the normal, usual, and generally reliable way to raise children is a great cultural achievement, not a law of nature.
