Marriage as Purposeful Institution

By: Ryan T. Anderson (Diary)  

When a baby is born, a mother always is nearby. The question is whether a father will be involved in the life of that child and, if so, for how long.

Marriage increases the odds that a man will be committed to both the children that he helps create and to the woman with whom he does so.

The recent oral arguments at the Supreme Court highlighted this and other key questions about redefining marriage as we’ve always understood it in America. That is, marriage is the union of a man and woman as husband and wife to provide any children of that union with a father and a mother.

A leading argument from liberals is that marriage so understood unjustly excludes same-sex relationships. However, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, during arguments on California’s Proposition 8, resisted any characterization that marriage was about “excluding a particular group.”

As Roberts explained: “When the institution of marriage developed historically, people didn’t get around and say let’s have this institution, but let’s keep out homosexuals. The institution developed to serve purposes that, by their nature, didn’t include homosexual couples.”

What are those purposes? In the book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, my co-authors and I argue that marriage is based on the anthropological truth that men and women are different and complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children need a mother and a father.

Indeed, there is no such thing as “parenting.” There is mothering, and there is fathering, and children do best with both. Although men and women are each capable of providing their children with a good upbringing, we typically see differences in the ways mothers and fathers interact with their children as well as in their functional roles. Dads are particularly important in the formation of sons and daughters.

David Popenoe, a sociologist at Rutgers University, put it this way:  “We should disavow the notion that ‘mommies can make good daddies,’ just as we should disavow the popular notion…that ‘daddies can make good mommies.’… The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being.”

Read more at Red State.