Cats and Dogs and Marriage Laws

Failure to define the term, though, will only lead to confusion about employee compensation and mischief at state-run venues. The legislators recognize a simple fact: No matter how one defines “dog,” it cannot be the case that both definitions are true. Either “dog” will be defined according to its observable operations, or it will be defined according to its nonessential outward appearance. They decide to go ahead and define “dog” in the “traditional” way, according to the reality of dogs and cats, such that cats are excluded...

The push to redefine marriage is rooted both in human desire and prior policy choices. Given our penchant for liberty as license, we have chosen no-fault divorce and the complete separation of sexual acts from their natural end, children. Thus we now understand marriage in terms of its secondary, non-essential characteristics, like romantic love.

Sadly, we already know the consequence of these choices: marriages dissolved, families broken, children without both parents (or with lots of parents but no sense of filial loyalty), abortion, couples discovering that they are genetically related through sperm-donor fathers, and all the other social upheavals that follow in the wake of this mess like sharks at a shipwreck.

Since we have fifty years of sad experience with chaos caused by tinkering with how marriage is practiced, it would seem absolutely foolish to pretend we can change what marriage is without waiting quite a long time to see how the changes work in isolated local experiments...

Marriage and family law have at their core, throughout history, a basic understanding of a universal fact: the sexual acts of man with woman result in children. For the sake of their offspring, they vow to each other and to the community to be sexually exclusive and remain together, blending their bodies, their goods, and their lives. Society supports them in their task. This is marriage.

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