Why Heteronormative Marriage Matters

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute speaks (video and audio at the original.)  Excerpts:

..."Marriage in every society is the preferred place for sex and childbearing. Childbearing and sex are somehow related," said Morse, author of Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village. "The sexual revolution took these three things—marriage, sex, and childbearing—apart."...

And this disintegration matters hugely. "The essential public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another—because you've got a mother and father for reproduction and a long period of dependency. Someone's got to take care of the kids," said Morse, author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long Love in a Hook Up World...

The institution of marriage serves to protect the vital interests of the most helpless, of the defenseless. "Children are entitled to a stable relationship with both parents. Kids can’t march to protect their own interests. A society has to protect a child's interests in advance of harm being done. Marriage is adult society's way of protecting children's rights proactively."

In order to permit same-sex couples to perform an act society would call "marriage," the state has to redefine marriage....

Morse laid out four principles underlying traditional marriage in law and society that redefining marriage would change:

• children are ordinarily entitled to a relationship with their mothers and fathers, and something extraordinary has to happen for that not to be true;
• mothers and fathers are not interchangeable;
• biology is the primary, normative way we define parenthood;
• and the state normally recognizes parentage as a biological fact and does not define or control parentage.

In treating same-sex couples as parents, a child's right to a stable relationship with both biological parents would go away, mothers and fathers would be assumed to be interchangeable, and biology would become irrelevant to state recognition of parentage. Recognition would now rest on state-created tests for parentage, investigating family lives to determine who took care of the child, who was legally married to the biological parent, and other such criteria.

"Natural marriage is an organic, self-sustaining reality," Morse, who'd campaigned for Proposition 8, explained. "Same-sex marriage is a totally state created and enforced reality. It will survive with the help of the state..."