National Review has a long editorial in its September 20 edition making “The case for marriage.” It all sounds so wonderfully antiquated. NR takes note that society regulates sex through marriage, that biologically it takes a man and woman to create a child and thus:
That does not mean that marriage is worthwhile only insofar as it yields children. (The law has never taken that view.) But the institution is oriented toward child-rearing. (The law has taken exactly that view.) What a healthy marriage culture does is encourage adults to arrange their lives so that as many children as possible are raised and nurtured by their biological parents in a common household.
It is hard to make the case that marriage is for creating children when more than a third of children are born to single women and women, married or unmarried, can have children through medical interventions rather than the intimate bonds of matrimony. I’m not dumping on marriage as a lost cause although it certainly appears so, in at least a superficial way. Nor am I going to maintain that marriage is difficult to defend in an age of divorce and cohabitation which both undermine marriage. Rather, I am pointing out that many moral issues (marriage, artificial insemination, abortion, contraception) are indeed connected and once the connection between sex and procreation is severed, marriage becomes almost impossible to defend because it becomes just another relationship, not something essential to the well-being of society. In other words, the work of saving traditional marriage (one man and one woman in an exclusive relationship) and restoring the institution to its vaunted place in society is extremely challenging if not outright impossible to do without addressing abortion, contraception and reproductive technologies.
