A silly idea is making the rounds that so-called gay marriage should be embraced by conservatives because “marriage is a conservative principle.” By this reasoning, conservatives should embrace incestuous “marriages,” coerced “marriages,” and “marriages” with children too.
Of course marriage is a conservative principle. Nothing is more fundamental to the well-being of children and to the flourishing of the family than the bond between their father and mother. Nothing else can join those now living with all the generations dead and not yet born in an unending covenant of love and kinship. Marriage is the name of the procreative partnership that does these things. Just because it does them, law protects it.
The problem is that the other so-called kinds of marriages are not marriages. They aren’t because they don’t do those things. One might as well define cats as another kind of dogs, nighttime as another kind of day, or rain as another kind of sunlight.
If anything goes, if marriage is in the eye of the beholder, then why have marriage laws at all? There is nothing for them to be about; there is nothing to protect. We won't have redefined marriage. We will have abolished it.
Tomorrow: Why Drag God into Natural Law?