The Case for Conjugal Marriage

An Unpublished Guest Opinion Piece Defending Conjugal Marriage

by the UT Anscombe Society, 3/30/2013

This week, two cases come before the United States Supreme Court that may decide the future legal status of marriage: California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as the conjugal union between a man and a woman, is challenged as a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the United States Constitution; and the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, that prevents Federal Law from recognizing state revisions of marriage is challenged for unconstitutionally discriminating against same-sex couples. In each case the nature of marriage is liable to be revised. 

In the new book What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, University of Princeton professor Robert P. George presents the case for the conjugal view of marriage. George defines marriage as a social institution founded upon the pre-political reproductive potential and complementarity of the sexes; and marriage revisionism as the belief that marriage is founded upon an imminently revisable social convention. As marriage is founded upon natural sexual differences that are prior to both society and the state, it is not merely a social convention, and consequently may not be revised without frustrating the very purposes of nature. Marriage is necessary because the intercourse of the sexes is naturally directed towards the reproduction of children, for whom both parents assume mutual right and responsibility. Thus marriage is essentially for the welfare of children. 

All of this is implicitly denied by revisionists of marriage, who recognize no essential nature to the sexes that directs marriage for the purpose of sexual reproduction, and who hold marriage to be little more than the public recognition of the union of two consensual partners. Rather, sex and marriage are held to be malleable human constructions that are no more real and natural than the words we use to speak about them. Just as words can and do change their meaning, so must the legal definition of marriage change to conform to our preferences.

To make different things equal is to abolish their differences. Yet the differences of the sexes are salutary insofar as they serve to realize the intrinsic purposes of nature. Abolishing the legal recognition of natural sexual difference in the conjugal definition of marriage has the consequence of suppressing the public meaning of sex as natural, and the meaning of marriage as a conjugal union of the sexes for the reproduction of children. As law informs society, so does the redefinition of marriage inform social practices of dating as well as the culture that supports marriage.  

George has ably responded to the criticism that the conjugal view of marriage cannot explain how infertile couples may marry while lacking the potential to reproduce. This objection mistakenly conflates two kinds of potential which differ in their causes while sharing only the absence of an effect: mutually infertile men and women may fulfill the natural condition of marriage, as a conjugal union of opposed sexes that are jointly reproductive in kind, while not reproductive in effect; but a union of persons of the same sex can never be reproductive in either kind or effect. This is because the sexes of male and female are the only kinds that may naturally join together to reproduce children. Thus the objection from infertile couples conflates the distinction between the sexual kinds of causes with the effects of infertility precisely because the natural difference of the sexes is not recognized. 

The UT Anscombe Society promotes the conjugal view of marriage and encourages all readers to support the National Organization for Marriage’s March for Marriage this week in Washington D.C. as the conjugal definition of marriage is defended in court. The continued vitality of the social practice of marriage requires a culture that recognizes and supports marriage. As children are uniquely produced and reared within the conjugal union of husbands and wives, the defense of marriage is vital for the protection and welfare of children.