http://www.profam.org/pub/fia/fia_1804.htm
By Bryce Christensen, Ph.D.*
* Bryce Christensen teaches English at Southern Utah University and is a contributing editor to The Family in America. He is author of Utopia Against the Family (Ignatius) and editor of volumes including the Retreat from Marriage, The Family Wage, and Day Care: Child Psychology and Adult Economics.
No prominent American commentator anticipated the rapid sequence of events that in early 2004 brought hundreds of homosexual couples—in Massachusetts, California, New York, Oregon, and elsewhere—before religious and public officials who were willing to pronounce them married.[1] Sympathetic observers marveled at the bravery of gay activists and compared their wedding ceremonies to the acts of black civil-rights demonstrators in the Sixties. Unsympathetic observers expressed dismay at how brazen homosexuals had become in violating moral tradition and in defying statutory law. Conservative groups have subsequently set in motion a number of initiatives—voter referenda, legislative actions, and constitutional amendments—on both state and federal levels to prohibit further homosexual marriages and to invalidate those that have occurred. But amid all of the many pundits praising or damning homosexuals for breaking the marriage barrier, few have reflected on just what kind of institution homosexuals—who have never laid hold of marriage in the past—are now claiming. Indeed, if Americans scrutinize carefully the way the national culture has in recent decades re-defined wedlock for heterosexuals, they may well conclude that it is not homosexuals that have changed so much, but rather marriage itself. Far from being some astonishing development reflecting unprecedented new attitudes among homosexuals, homosexual weddings constitute the predictable (not natural, but entirely predictable) culmination of cultural changes that have radically de-natured marriage.
Once defined by religious doctrine, moral tradition, and home-centered commitments to child rearing and gender complementarity in productive labor, marriage has become a deracinated and highly individualistic and egalitarian institution, no longer implying commitment to home, to Church, to childbearing, to traditional gender duties, or even (permanently) to spouse. Gone is the productive husband-wife bond defined by mutual sacrifice and cooperative labor, replaced by dual-careerist vistas of self-fulfillment and consumer satisfaction. That homosexuals now want the strange new thing marriage has become should surprise no one: contemporary marriage, after all, certifies a certain legitimacy in the mainstream of American culture and delivers tax, insurance, life-style, and governmental benefits—all without imposing any of the obligations of traditional marriage (which homosexuals decidedly do not want). Thus, while the attempt to deny homosexuals the right to marry is understandable and even morally and legally justified, such an attempt is probably foredoomed if it does not lead to a broader effort to restore moral and religious integrity to marriage as a heterosexual institution.