The Abolition of Marriage

New conceptions of marriage threaten to make “traditional marriage” not only unfashionable but also inaccessible.

by Christopher Wolfe
May 2, 2011

People generally take it for granted that marriage will be “available,” but despite the powerful forces inclining people to marry, the availability of marriage as an institution they can choose to enter cannot be taken for granted. This is not unlike another major social institution: property. There are powerful forces inclining human beings to accumulate property, and there is a strong natural basis for properly qualified property rights, but in a given society, such property rights may not be available. Property is both natural and pre-political, on one hand, and also a social institution essentially dependent on various legal arrangements, on the other. So, too, with marriage.

One of the ways in which marriage can become unavailable to people is for the political community to offer people an institution called “marriage” that is not really marriage. By inculcating in its citizens—through social practices and laws—a notion of marriage that lacks some of its essential ingredients, a political society could, effectively, make “real marriage” impossible for many of its citizens. (Note that, today, those who believe that marriage has certain essential features that cannot be legislated away are reduced to using the term “traditional marriage,” in an effort to distinguish their beliefs from the very different reality that today’s “marriage” has become.)

One way to make real marriage unavailable to people is to make “marriage” a contract that is temporary and terminable at the will of either party. Whatever the impact of the allowance of divorce in a certain limited number of cases had been, the shift to no-fault divorce has profoundly changed the very notion of marriage among Americans, and has deeply damaged it. the rest image by Anthony Kelly

Moreover, the existence of de facto homosexual couples with children provides no more justification for legalizing same-sex marriage than the existence of de facto polygamous families provides justification for legalizing polygamy.