Marriage: Merely a Social Construct?

by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson and Robert P. George
December 29, 2010

A response to Northwestern Law Professor Andrew Koppelman.

We are grateful for Andrew Koppelman’s recent reply to our argument in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy that marriage is the conjugal union of husband and wife. Thanks to his honesty and candor, the ensuing exchange should set in stark relief the implications of redefining civil marriage.

Professor Koppelman graciously credits our article with having “done [readers] a service with [a] succinct and clear exposition” of the arguments for conjugal marriage “that is accessible to the general reader.” Noting that “the most prominent response to [our] paper, by NYU Law Professor Kenji Yoshino, doesn’t really engage with any of [our] arguments,” Koppelman writes, “Here I will try to do better.”

Koppelman has indeed contributed importantly to the debate. Besides providing an opportunity for us to defend a core premise of our view, he has forthrightly admitted—he might say, embraced—the less politically palatable implications of rejecting our position.

Against our view that marriage is a pre-political form of relationship (albeit one that the state has compelling reasons to support and regulate), Koppelman holds that marriage is merely a social and legal construction—the pure product of conventions. the rest-links at site