What is Marriage? Part Eight, A Cruel Bargain?

This is part 8 of 8 of my series on marriage, based on Girgis’ What is Marriage? Marriage is a comprehensive union. The state has excellent reasons to recognize it and enact the correct view of it. These reasons are not rooted in some obscure ideology or private interest, but variously and deeply in human … Read more

What is Marriage? Part Seven, Justice and Equality

Revisionists raise objections to the conjugal view:  that it is inconsistent in recognizing infertile marriages, and at odds with the principle of equal access to marriage. Here I’ll show that both objections fail. First, infertility. An infertile man and woman can together still form a true marriage–a comprehensive union–which would differ only in degree, not … Read more

What is Marriage? Part Six, Threatening Moral and Religious Freedom

The harms of redefining civil marriage would extend beyond the couple and their children, to include anyone who holds the conjugal view. Americans are not particularly patient with those we think are enemies of equality. People who have attitudes that remind us of Jim Crow, Japanese internment camps or forbidding women the vote are today’s … Read more

What is Marriage? Part Five, What’s the Harm?

So, then, what is the harm? To pick up right where we left off, as a revisionist might put it, “how would gay marriage affect your lives, liberties, or opportunities, or your own marriages?” Remember that from the beginning I have said that this debate is not about homosexuality, but about marriage. I’ll show later … Read more

What is Marriage? Part Four, Marriage isn’t Malleable

This is part four of my series on marriage. This article will focus on the second argument of some who think that marriage is changeable to no end, which is one of the main assumptions by those who want to change marriage laws today. They say “marriage has no distinctive public value, and this being … Read more