Gay marriage isn't 'relational good'

Traditionally marriage marks a rite of passage from one status to another which commands social recognition – a union of man and woman who form a new family and household whose offspring become members of society with the task of social reproduction when in turn they reach adulthood and get married.

However, the benefit for society comes at a loss for the individuals involved – namely the loss of personal freedom linked to the new imperative of sexual fidelity and the responsibility for educating and socialising the children.

To the extent that contemporary culture and the law are eroding the sources for this commitment, the gain in freedom for individuals in one generation is the loss for society in the next generation – as children born outside wedlock tend to lack socialisation, are more introvert and less able to form permanent personal bonds than children born within a marriage. As such, marriage is much more than a private choice to cohabit or a contract to cooperate. Instead, it marks both a socially endorsed inter-personal union whose holistic ‘total’ is greater than the sum of its ‘parts’.

Scruton puts this well: “Having assumed the right to solemnise marriages and to endow them with legal status, the State must then follow the desires and inclinations of its current citizens, and redefine the institution accordingly [… Gay marriage] assumes that an institution in which absent generations are essentially involved, can be endlessly amended for the sake of the living, and without reference to the unborn and the dead”.

Thus, marriage is a good that exceeds private profit and offers social benefits. That is why in the past the State has upheld the matrimonial ideal – precisely because it is a relational good which individuals can only enjoy together and which they offer to society as a gift, especially motherhood and children.

In addition to motherhood, the other main gift of marriage is the celebration of sexual difference, on which not just interpersonal relationship but also whole cultures rest (including the arts, literature, fashion, etc.). Indeed, the matrimonial rite of passage marks the coming together, which – in the words of Scruton – is “an existential leap, rather than a passing experiment. Sexual attraction was shaped by this, and even if the shaping was – at some deep level – a cultural and not a human universal, it made desire into a kind of tribute paid to the other sex. Marriage has grown around the idea of sexual difference and all that sexual difference means. To make this feature accidental rather than essential is to change marriage beyond recognition. Gays want marriage because they want the social endorsement that it signifies; but by admitting gay marriage we deprive marriage of its social meaning. It ceases to be what it has been hitherto, namely a union of the sexes, and a blessing conferred by the unborn on the living. The pressure for gay marriage is therefore in a certain measure self-defeating […]”.

In other words, gay marriage strips matrimony of its ontological dimension, i.e. the fact that men and women have distinct beings which are nonetheless equal – just not the same. At the heart of the problem lies a conflation of equality with sameness and fair, equal treatment with exchangeability. Men and women are now seen to be exchangeable, whether in terms of professions, social roles or styles of dress and conduct that increasingly erase any distinction between masculinity and femininity. That is why the traditional dramatisation of the different sexes has been supplanted by the androgynous uniformity of metrosexual culture that is variously more homosexual or more heterosexual.