Marriage: Only for a Man and a Woman

                                                                                                                                             Vol. XXII, No. 2, February 2009

... You cannot shatter the conventional definition of marriage, change the rules that govern behavior, endorse practices antithetical to the tenets of all the world's major religions, obscure the enormously consequential function of procreation and child-rearing – and then cheerfully assert on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that this will strengthen marriage. If we are to decide that marriage needs to be fundamentally amended, surely we should do so only if and when a compelling case has been made for a superior alternative. For homosexuals themselves, gay liberation has wrought much agony, instability, promiscuity, and early death. There is very little in it that recommends itself to the rest of us. And if we are responsible, we will turn away this invitation to experiment cavalierly with our future.

     With all due respect to proponents of same-sex marriage, it is also important to say publicly what most of us still believe privately, namely, that marriage between a man and a woman is in every way to be preferred to the marriage of two men or two women. Because there is a natural complementarity between men and women – sexual, emotional, temperamental, spiritual – marriage allows for a wholeness and a completeness that cannot be won in any other way. ("For this reason," says Genesis, "a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.") And, based as it is on the principle of complementarity, marriage is also about a great deal more than love.

[William Bennett, The Broken Hearth (Waterbrook Press, 2001) pp. 132-3]