Score One for Nature

November 04, 2009
Anthony Esolen

Voters in Maine last night narrowly repealed a law granting to same-sex couples the recognition of being married. I am choosing my words advisedly here. A man can no more marry a man than he can marry a post. A woman cannot marry a woman, any more than she can marry a hair dryer or a rainbow. Yes, it is true, they can form eroticized friendships that mimic marriage, just as they can do things with their bodies (as can a man and woman together) that mimic sexual intercourse. But they cannot form the one-flesh union of man and woman that is biologically designed, when the conditions are right, to bring about a new human being. This is a plain fact. Indeed, there are biological changes that occur in both man and woman in the marital embrace that suggest that their union functions as a single organism, literally the "one flesh" that Jesus says was the Father's will for them "in the beginning," meaning not only before the Fall, but at the foundation of all sexual reality here and now, and forevermore.

One young lady interviewed yesterday said, with breathless naivete, that the issue was all about love, and love can hardly be a bad thing, can it? But no, the issue is not all about love. Christians and Orthodox Jews and others who care about preserving some freedoms apart from the state, and some vestiges of a natural life, should take heed. It is not all about love. It is about many things. First, it is about whether we shall all become, as the Canadian political philosopher Douglas Farrow puts it, "chattels of the state." That is because as long as the natural family is recognized as prior to the creation of the state, then we may still argue that it possesses its own legitimate sphere of authority, and indeed that the state is in some sense beholden to, and subordinate to, and the artificial construct of families, and not the other way around. Simply put, once the state assumes the authority to rule that relationships outside the boundaries of the natural constitute married relationships, then the family becomes a mere ward of the state; for the power to define implies, a fortiori, the power to control. That this is true in the tyrananny of Canada is evident from legislation and court decisions that intrude ever more intimately into the everyday workings of the family. the rest