03/18/2004: "Great American Think-Off"

Thanks to Greg over at crowhill.net, I've been working on a essay for this years Great American Think-Off. This year's question is: Should same-sex marriages be prohibited?

The only other rule is that the essay must be 750 words or less. I additionally restricted myself to not making a religious or bible based argument and also took the advice from former winners to include personal examples from my life. So here's your chance to rip apart an essay of mine! Bleed away with the red ink and let me know what you think of my preliminary entry (which is currently EXACTLY 750 words and is due by April 1st):


We live in a country that has mixed together both religious marriage and civil marriage into one institution. This isn’t the case in other countries. My wife’s Mexican friends had two marriage ceremonies when they got married. First, about six months before they ‘got married’ they had a civil ceremony. They had a short ceremony and a small party with family and friends. Six months later they got married in the Catholic Church and their ‘real’ marriage began.

But that’s not how we get married in the United States. We’ve co-mingled the concepts of a religious and a civil marriage. We’ve forgotten that the goals and privileges of the two are separate. While religions are committed to helping their members live good moral lives and promote marriage as a means to accomplish that, society has a very practical reason for supporting marriage.

Society is a very pragmatic institution. Society only gives benefits to people when those people bear practical fruit. For society, the practical reason for supporting marriage is not love, but because marriages create families.

Families are the means by which society creates children and raises them to be good members of society. Those children are the future of society. As such, the marital role of creating and raising children is quite obviously a very important role in society and a very pragmatic one at that. This is the means by which a marriage can fulfill its societal role and earn the benefits that society is willing to give it.

So it logically follows that those who fulfill this very important and pragmatic responsibility, deserve the benefits of marriage. Who are these couples?

I had some friends growing up who were a male same-sex couple that adopted a young boy who had been badly abused by his biological parents. My friends cared for him even though it was difficult. They extended their love to a boy that most couples could not. While most couples were insisting on adopting an infant, this couple was willing to have a deep parental love for a child who was not the perfect baby we all hope for. They raised that young boy to become a well adjust young man who will soon be a good productive member of society.

My parents, on the other hand, got divorced when I was 12. When they got divorced, our family struggled. Their inability to successfully keep their marriage together had a profound and lasting impact on both my brother and me. Yet my parents’ obligation to raise my brother and me of course did not die with the death of their marriage. No, they continued to be our parents and we as a divided family struggled to overcome the difficulties of that situation. They struggled just like my friends struggled to raise their adopted son. Yet they have helped both my brother and I to become good members of society.

It would seem, that using the rational of raising children as the criteria for marriage, that both my parents, even while separated, and my friends deserved the benefits of marriage. Both were providing that very important role in society. But we naturally accept that my parents no longer deserved the benefits of marriage, while we struggle to decide if same-sex couples deserve the benefits.

So who deserves the benefits of marriage? The answer is only those who live up to the high ideal that marriage calls us to: To come together to be in a life giving, life lasting union and to raise the children who may result from that union. Only a heterosexual couple can participate in that kind of a union because a same-sex couple is unable to have a life giving union.

I don’t think anyone would argue that in an ideal world, the best people to raise a child are its biological parents. We as society want to encourage this ideal and we have created the benefits of marriage for those who are willing to live up to that ideal. Those who attempt to be in this kind of a union and fail, those who create life without the union, and those who are in a union that can not create life, are not living up to the ideal. This ideal, of a life giving, life lasting union, is the heart of marriage and it should not be compromised to give the same benefits to anyone who is picking up the pieces when people fall from this ideal that best benefits society.