Why the American Electorate was Right to Reject Gay Marriage

Civitas, 5 November 2004

Among the various results of Tuesday’s elections in the United States, of only slightly less significance than George Bush’s victory over John Kerry was the decisive rejection by the American electorate of ‘gay’ marriage. In eleven states, voters were given the opportunity to vote for or against amendments to their state constitutions confining marital status to unions between members of the opposite sex . In not a single one of them did voters do other than register their support for such an amendment, often by huge majorities.
In the same week as that in which the political elites of Europe made it plain no European could expect to hold high public office there if prepared openly to call homosexuality a sin, the American public made it plain no Americans could expect to enjoy the benefits of marital status unless prepared to join in union with a member of the opposite sex.

In rejecting the idea of gay marriage, were American voters simply giving vent to an ugly ill-informed form of homophobic bigotry of which, clearly, the majority of MEP’s consider anyone to be guilty who considers homosexuality a sin? Or were they merely registering their discernment in heterosexual marriage of a social value that cannot be replicated by homosexual unions, a value that would be threatened were homosexual unions granted a similar status to those heterosexual unions in which the parties choose to marry?
Homosexuals say that any positive human values, such as devotion, intimacy, and even good parenting, capable of being instantiated by heterosexual unions can also be exhibited by homosexual ones. Hence, so they argue, any legal privileges conferred on heterosexual couples who marry and denied to homosexual couples, through being unable to marry, can only be unjust to the latter.
There is, however, one important property heterosexual unions possess that homosexual ones do not and cannot, no matter how monogamous and caring they are. The form of sexual act that consummates heterosexual unions is the unique one through which procreation can and does take place naturally. Each child is born of some woman in consequence of the sperm of some man having fertilised one of her eggs. Typically, these acts of conception result from heterosexual intercourse.
In so far as children and their mothers benefit from receiving the care and support of the fathers of these children, marriage between heterosexual couples secures an environment for parents most likely to lead to such paternal care of children and spouses. For in such circumstances, the mothers know their sexual partner has undertaken to care for any children they might have, and the male partners can expect any child their partner has to be his.
In according legal privileges to those prepared to make such reciprocal commitments, society registers its approval of heterosexual couples who make them. It does so because of the value such reciprocal commitments bring to the children they have and thereby to the wider society of which they form part.
Whatever social benefits might accrue from homosexual couples being faithful to one another rather than promiscuous, since all forms of such relations are necessarily non-procreative, none of them can ever possess the same social significance as those which are procreative, potentially at least. This difference would remain, even if, in consequence of undergoing some special ceremony in which the parties to it pledged themselves to each other, homosexual partners became entitled to exactly the same legal rights and privileges as heterosexual couples acquire upon marrying.
In rejecting gay marriage, therefore, the American electorate need not necessarily be construed as having intended to express any form of moral disapproval of homosexuality. They need merely be construed as having giving expression to their recognition that heterosexuality has a social significance and value that homosexuality can never have.
Those advocating gay marriage do so because they recognise human sexuality can and should be harnessed to work in support of love, rather than just be a source of mere physical titillation. They must also surely admit that only heterosexual activity can naturally of itself issue in the procreation of children.
All it takes beyond recognition of these two facts to justify confining the legal privileges of marital status to heterosexual couples willing to enter into marriage is recognition of two further facts. The first is that, other things being equal, children benefit from receiving the care of both their parents and the parents of any benefit from being able to care for, and to give to and receive from their children love. The second is that society has a legitimate interest in wishing children born into it to grow up in the most favourable conditions for them possible.
Since marriage between the parents of any child provides for that child, other things being equal, the optimum possible conditions in which to be brought up, it follows society has a legitimate interest in encouraging couples liable to have children to marry.
Parties to unions who cannot become joint parents, therefore, have no just cause to complain if society refuses to accord them the same status as it willingly accords heterosexual couples who choose to marry. This is because unions of the former kind are incapable of serving the same positive social function as justifies heterosexual couples willing to enter into the marital bond being accorded by society such a privileged status relative to all others who are not.
The American electorate has spoken. In so doing, there is much it has given Europeans to reflect on.