Sanity & Matrimony
Ten Arguments in Defense of Marriage (Part 2 of 2)
by Anthony Esolen
In Part 1 of this essay, published in the previous (July/August) issue of Touchstone, I argued that, while many believe that all principled arguments against the legalization of same-sex “marriage” (or, more accurately, pseudogamy) must stem from religious precepts, I could present ten such arguments based solely on common sense, history, and logic. In that essay, I enumerated the first six of those ten objections; here, I present the other four.
Trust Undermined
7. The legalization of homosexual pseudogamy seals us in a culture of divorce. In the United States, it is estimated that nearly half of all marriages will end in divorce. It is hard to see how any community can survive the resulting break-up of homes, the smashing of friendships, the jumble and shuffle of neighborhoods, and the underlying assumption that human beings are not to be trusted.
Social science has finally come round to showing just a bit of what we all ought to have known anyway: Divorce is deeply damaging to the family and to the community. Boys who grow up apart from their fathers are many times more likely to fall prey to drugs and crime; girls are more likely to seek male affirmation elsewhere and bear children out of wedlock. Spend a little time getting to know the destroyed lives of a few of the millions of young men in prison, and then try to defend divorce—or the habit in some communities of never forming a marriage in the first place.
Prior to the age of no-fault divorce, we were told by the social reformers that the current divorce laws were outdated and cruel, often compelling people to manufacture ugly accusations against one another just to procure the divorce. We were told that the reform of the laws would not increase the incidence of divorce—since those who wanted to divorce would do so eventually in any case. But it would save a great deal of human misery.
Yet that is exactly what the no-fault divorce laws have failed to do. Divorce swept the land like a plague, and brought misery in its wake. And the no-fault system is patently unjust: It often subjects the wronged party to the whim of the guilty one; it rules out the most commonsense considerations of child custody; and it reduces marriage to a status below that of a business contract.
If one business partner in a gas station embezzled funds and used them to buy stock in the competition, would that partner, upon dissolution of the contract, get to claim half of the original station? If the embezzling partner were a woman, would she get to compel her former business partner to provide her financial support as she bought even more of the competitor’s stock? Would not such malfeasance land people like this in jail? Why do we take the ownership of corporations more seriously than the establishment of families?
Any statesman must see that we cannot continue this way. At the basis of all civilization lies trust: I must be able to believe that the people driving down the road will stay on their own side of the yellow line. Divorce begins by undermining trust in marriage (and that is bad enough, given our plummeting birthrates) and ends by undermining trust altogether. We must retrace our steps; we must bring some semblance of justice back to divorce law.
But how can we do so while legalizing homosexual pseudogamy? Again, the principle for the legalization is that people have a right to “fulfill” themselves sexually. But some marriages are unhappy—or some people who are married come to think that it would be more “fulfilling” to leap the fence. How can we deny them this? Or how can we blame them? How can we penalize the breaker of a family, when his or her motives are those we have blessed in the case of the homosexual?
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more on marriage from the online archives
21.1—January/February 2008
John Chrysostom’s Discovery of the Blessings & Mysteries of Marriage by Mike Aquilina
29.1—Jan/Feb 2016
on Marriage, Moral Corruption & the Christian Duty of Witness by Regis Nicoll
28.1—January/February 2015
on State Impositions & Church Acquiescence by Stephen Baskerville
more from the online archives
32.1—January/February 2019
Divine Love & the Love of Man & Woman Surpass Mere Consent by Anthony Esolen
37.5—Sept/Oct 2024
Why Law Schools Can't Teach Law
A sidebar to How Law Lost Its Way by Adam MacLeod
17.4—May 2004
The Unhappy & Abusive Marriage of Liberalism & Modernism by James Hitchcock
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