King of the Hill

As the quality of The Simpsons has waned, my husband and I have gained a new appreciation for King of the Hill. Admittedly, this show's quality has also waned inevitably with age, but it is in syndication on Fox, and we enjoy catching an episode here and there. One thing I've noticed about the show, and something I greatly appreciate about it, is that the main character, Hank Hill, is a truly good husband and father. Like Homer Simpson, so many other TV fathers are bumbling self-centered idiots. They always seem to redeem themselves by the end of the episode, but getting out of the doghouse is a nearly constant challenge for them. Not so for Hank Hill; he's the opposite of the usual TV father. I would marry a Hank Hill in a heartbeat.

But Hank Hill has his flaws too. In the episode I watched last night, Hank is supposed to take his 12-year-old son, Bobby, on a hunting trip to kill his first deer and become a man. But Hank is nervous about making the trip because he'll have to spend hours alone, talking, with his son. Hank is uncomfortable talking about anything particularly personal or private, yet Bobby has been brought up by his mother to be open and honest. Due to his fear, Hank procrastinates on getting a hunting license, and on the day of the trip, he discovers that all the hunting licenses have been sold out. Bobby will have to remain a boy for another year. The story is poetically resolved as Hank, hoping to give his son the rite of passage into manhood that he is due, allows Bobby to drive his truck. A deer runs out into the street and Bobby hits it, finally getting his kill so that he may be a man.

This episode pokes plenty of fun at this particular rite of passage, presumably a Texan one, that requires a boy to kill in order to be considered a man, but it never mocks rites of passage themselves. In the last line of the episode, as the neighbors are admiring Bobby's kill, he says,

"I couldn't have done it without my dad."

This reminded me of my husband's assertion that in order for a boy to become a man, he must demonstrate physical superiority to his father. Perhaps that was my husband's particular rite of passage, and clearly such rites do vary for different people. Nevertheless, I'm detecting a pattern that a boy's initiation into manhood seems to always involve, and perhaps requires, the participation of the boy's father. Is this part of the reason that so many fatherless sons have so many behavioral and emotional problems, and as adults seem to never grow up?

The Simpsons

My husband and I are big Simpsons fans. The quality of the show has been going downhill for several years now, but we still watch every Sunday night anyway, hoping for a bit of the brilliance we used to enjoy. Last night there wasn't anything much on offer, and there was one point of the show that seriously disappointed me.

Homer has managed to put the entire fire department out of commission, and on the news Kent Brockman interviews a man hanging out of the second story window of a burning house and asks him how he feels considering the fact that no one is coming to save him. The man in the burning house responds to this effect,

"It's not as bad as the fact that somewhere gays are being allowed to marry. That's the real emergency."

Kent Brockman sarcastically replies,

"Once again, tragedy has brought out the best in us."

The point the Simpsons writers are apparently trying to make is that with so much tragedy in our world, paying attention to the issue of gay marriage is petty and stupid. However, it is only those opposed to gay marriage who are being petty and stupid. One is left to assume that those who are fighting for gay marriage while hanging out the window of a burning house are doing just fine. But if it's so petty to defend traditional marriage despite all the other tragedies we face, then it must be just as silly for gay marriage supporters to be focusing on this issue.

It is only through a major paradigm shift in my own understanding of what marriage is and what purpose it serves at both a personal and public level that I have managed to have a successful marriage myself. Marriage is a fundamental social institution, and I personally love my marriage, so I understand why some gays want to be able to get married while still maintaining their gay identity. But if they care so much about marriage that they feel they should have a right to it even against the will of the majority of Americans, then they need to understand and respect the opinions of those who also care so much about marriage that they don't want to fundamentally change it. Those who defend marriage are not simply being petty. They are on one side of the conflict of goods that David Blankenhorn details in The Future of Marriage. And to me, they are much more persuasive.

First Comes Love...

This past weekend, my husband and I visited his brother and family in Madison, WI. The weather was beautiful, so we went to the park. After playing a little softball, my 10-year-old niece and I headed for the swingset. Eventually, our swings were in perfect sync. We were precisely side by side as our swings went forward and back to the same exact height. At this point, my niece said,

"We're married."

Confused, I asked,

"What?"

She repeated,

"We're married. That's what me and my friends say at school when our swings line up like this."

The first thing I thought of was this rhyme from my childhood.

Billy and Susie sitting in a tree,
k-i-s-s-i-n-g.
First comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes Susie and the baby carriage.

It was a naughty rhyme that we didn't sing in front of adults, and if you wanted to be especially naughty, you added,

That's not all, that's not all,
Billy's drinking alcohol.

The reason I thought of this rhyme wasn't necessarily because my niece mentioned marriage, but primarily because I first learned this rhyme on the swings. My friends and I almost always spent recess on the swingset, where we not only learned this rhyme, but sang it regularly. It was at the swings that I learned the rhyme that expressed our childhood's basic cultural understanding of love, marriage, and babies. And alcohol.

The image of marriage I learned on the swings through that little rhyme carried a lot of weight. It implied sex (k-i-s-s-i-n-g), which is entirely missing from my niece's metaphor. But the naughtiest part of all was the mention of alcohol, which we would often leave off when singing it. A girl would only add that part if she wanted to be provocative. The image of Susie with her baby carriage while Billy is stumbling around drunk represented a failing family unit, or at least a suffering one.

Not only did this rhyme teach us that marriage is about sex and having babies, but it put the whole process of becoming a family in order. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes babies. Marriage was certainly not something we could ever possibly do with one of our friends, and the consequences of failure at it would be painful indeed. It was a guide map and a warning regarding the great responsibility of marriage.

My childhood friends and I also enjoyed synchronous swinging, but we never called it being married. When my niece first said it, I was confused because I didn't even realize she was referring to our swinging. Her metaphor for marriage suggests it is something two best friends might do. It is simply two people, doing the same thing, facing the same direction, moving in sync with each other, side by side as equals, a mirror image of each other.

This metaphor is devoid of sex and children, and emphasizes equality between the partners. So why not marry her best friend? But this image doesn't just open up the possibility of gay marriage. What if one person decides to swing more slowly, or more vigorously? Does that mean they are now divorced? How very temporary this image of marriage is. And what if three friends manage to swing synchronously? Are the three of them married to each other? And what is the purpose of this marriage? Just having fun? What a frivolous, empty view of marriage.

During our visit, she also showed us the gift she had made for her parents for their recent wedding anniversary - a trophy. I hope that when she grows up, the value she places on her parents' marriage outweighs the overly simplistic and distorted metaphor for marriage that she learned on the swings.

Mystical Husband

Last night I intended to once again engross myself in The Future of Marriage, but instead, my husband and I got to talking, and there went my night. I am so blessed to have such a rich marriage. Ten years in the same bed, under the same roof, and we still captivate and fascinate each other with these long, deeply engaging conversations. Family is definitely our most frequent topic, as it was last night.

My husband told me a story once long ago of the time when he was a teenager that he had to stand up to his father physically, and it forever changed their relationship. He didn't recount this story last night, but he was definitely referring to it when he explained to me that in order for a boy to become a man, he must, in one clearly defined moment of lasting import, prove his physical superiority to his father. Whether this physical superiority is gained through simply being younger and healthier than one's father, or whether it's a superiority of strength, speed, or athletic prowess, a boy simply cannot be a man if he hasn't done this thing.

I have no way to know for sure whether my husband is right about this, but I do know that he adores and admires his father. They have a strong, solid relationship built on real love and deep mutual respect. There is no question between them or among the rest of us about where each of them stands. They bring out the best in the people around them, especially when they are together. They are at once anchors and beacons of light for their family.

I also know that my father-in-law has remained single, without so much as a girlfriend, for the whole of the 20+ years since his wife divorced him. Despite all the pain and anger he has nursed over the years, he still cannot bear to take a second wife. If his children cannot call her Mom, how can he call her wife? The cost has been high, but this is the greatest gift he has given his children, and he continues to reap the rewards, year after year.

I am so blessed to be loved by these men, and I cannot wait to conceive and bear the next generation in this honorable tradition.

Thoughts on "The Future of Marriage" - Pt. 1

My copy of David Blankenhorn's The Future of Marriage finally arrived on Friday afternoon. I had a very busy weekend, but at my every rare free moment, Blankenhorn's book held my undivided attention. I just finished chapter 4 last night. By the end of this chapter, Blankenhorn has described the matrilineal Trobriand marriage culture and contrasted it with the patrilineal marriage culture of the Near East and Old Europe. By identifying the core similarity between these two completely opposite marriage cultures, and then seeing that it applies to virtually all the other known marriage cultures in history, he comes to define marriage at its essence to be “for every child, a mother and a father” (emphasis his).

In the process of distilling the core of marriage out of two opposing marriage cultures, he also identifies the source of the differences between these cultures, namely, what the people believe about where babies come from. Blankenhorn explains that from what evidence of prehistory that we have, it seems that prehistoric peoples generally worshipped female deities, viewed children as created primarily by the mother, with the father having little to do with raising, or even identifying his children. Around the same time that history dawned, marriage did as well, and it seems that at least part of the reason for this coinciding social evolution is that marriage connected children not only to their mothers, but to their fathers as well. However, lacking the knowledge we have today about how conception actually works, different societies developed different ideas about how babies are conceived.

In the Near East, children were believed to grow entirely out of the man’s semen. The semen was thought to be the physical source of a baby, while the woman merely provided a womb with which to incubate the child. The woman was compared to the soil in which one plants a seed. It is the seed that determines what kind of plant grows; the soil has no effect whatsoever in this regard. The soil simply feeds whatever seed might be planted there.

In the Trobriand Islands, the view is entirely opposite. It is thought that babies form completely out of the matter of the woman’s body, out of her menstrual blood, to be specific. Intercourse is believed to be loosely related to conceiving children, but not necessarily required. The father is not considered a biological relative of the child. Nevertheless, fatherhood is a revered social role. The fathers on these islands are extremely devoted and involved with their children. They play an enormous role in the development of their children, and the islanders believe that it is the father’s devotion and involvement that causes the children to physically resemble him. Blankenhorn suggests that these different understandings of the physical source of babies determine in large part the resultant marriage cultures. But in both cases, the aim is the same – to connect children with both their mother and father.

Of course, we now know that both of these views regarding the material source of babies is false. But one thing struck me as an important similarity and truth within both of these views. In both cases, the mother’s contribution to the developing child is much more bulky, structural, and essential, while the father’s contribution is to the form, shape, and character of the child. In the Near East version, the semen is likened to a seed, which is essentially a tiny set of instructions for how to use water, sunlight, and decaying matter to grow a plant. It is that set of instructions, an imprint, which determines the character of what grows. The mother’s or soil’s contribution is in providing access to the water and sunlight, and directly providing the nourishment itself, the physical bulk, of what is to grow. Similarly, in the Trobriand view, the mother’s menstrual blood is the matter with which the child is formed. It is her body itself that provides the physical matter for the child, while the father’s contribution is to form the appearance and character of the child through his direct and intimate involvement in the child’s development. The analogy offered to this in Blankenhorn’s book is that a father molds a child the way that grasping clay in your hand leaves your hand’s shape and imprint on it.

I first learned about where babies come from, in terms of eggs and sperm, at a young age from my mother. A few years later I learned about it in school, and it was then that I first saw a picture of an egg surrounded by sperm. I was very surprised to find that the egg is so many times bigger than the sperm. I suppose my surprise stemmed from having been so emphatically taught that men’s and women’s respective contributions to the source of a child are equal.

On the other hand, while a sperm is physically very small, it is encoded with some very important information. Of course, a child does get DNA from both parents, but it is specifically the father’s genetic contribution that determines whether a child is a boy or a girl. This is a profound contribution from the father to one’s identity. So, in this regard, the scientific truth does fit with both the Near Eastern and the Trobriand’s distorted beliefs on the subject.

This truth extends beyond conception into pregnancy, during which the mother literally builds a flesh and blood baby out of the actual biological matter of her own body, and then after giving birth through great physical pain and risk, feeds the child at her bosom, next to her heart, with milk that her own body creates. The father, meanwhile, shapes the type of person the child will become, whether it’s through the intimate interactions of the Trobriand culture or the disciplinarian role of the Near East and Old European cultures. In all of these cases, Mother provides the matter; Father provides the form.

Are these two contributions equal? They are certainly of equal importance, and I am very grateful to live in a time in history when we have scientific proof of this. Despite their equal importance, however, the contributions are very different, and in their individual attributes, they are not equal at all. A father does not give his child nearly the amount of physical sacrifice that a mother does, but the mother does not mold the character of the child nearly as much as the father does.

These examples from history demonstrate how inadequate scientific knowledge can lead to distorted beliefs about where babies come from, and then ultimately determine the marriage culture of different societies. It occurs to me that this same thing is happening right now, as we face another turning point in the history of marriage. I've regularly seen same-sex marriage advocates simply refuse to acknowledge the scientific truth that only the combination of a man and a woman can produce babies. And when they do acknowledge it, they dismiss it as being irrelevant to the debate. Our own lack of scientific truthfulness is distorting our marriage culture, the same way it distorted that of the societal examples in Blankenhorn's book. I'm guessing this is a point that Blankenhorn is about to make in the next few chapters, which I will be tackling tonight.

The fact that mothers provide the matter to build a child, while the father molds that child to its particular form also resonates in an intuitive way with the technological advances that might someday make same-sex reproduction possible. When and if this becomes a reality, it will only be possible for two women, never two men. This is because women do have within them the physical matter to build a child, so by taking a genetic imprint from another woman to use as sperm, modern technology can build a female child without a man's involvement. However, since only men carry the genes to create other men, two women can never build a boy, let alone form a man. On the other hand, two men, while having plenty of genetic imprints available to form both boys and girls, nevertheless lack the essential matter with which to build a flesh and blood baby. Same-sex reproduction will never be available to men.

A little reverence for the demonstrable facts of how babies are made goes a long way toward intuitively understanding what marriage is and why we need it. It is this very basic understanding of nature, along with religious tradition, that is the source of so many overwhelmingly voter-approved state constitutional marriage amendments, especially in places like Wisconsin, where the amendment was approved by an overwhelming margin despite the fact that the pollsters and pundits were predicting it to be a close call that could go either way. People know in a very visceral and intuitive way that marriage serves a profound purpose that would have to be discarded in order to institute same-sex marriage. It is only the encouragement of ignorance or dismissal of basic truths that allows the same-sex marriage proponents to make advances for their cause.

Catholic Marriage

I've noticed that many of the marriage advocates that I most respect are Catholic. Maggie Gallagher, Jennifer Roback Morse, apparently many of the folks at The Opine Editorials, etc. Having read some of John Paul II's Theology of the Body, I don't think this is a coincidence. From what little I know about it, I find that Catholic Church teaching on marriage, family, and life itself is entirely coherent and well-reasoned, and at the same time immensely inspiring.

I just have one big little problem - annulments.

Just for a little background, I was raised in the United Church of Christ, which I have heard many times referred to by members and clergy as a haven for "recovering Catholics." Catholicism is often mocked in my family, or at least it was before I married one, so now they at least refrain from doing so around us. But my husband might consider himself a recovering Catholic. He certainly has less interest in Catholicism than I do. So I hope the reader can forgive my ignorance as I wrestle the issue of annulments. I found a useful Q&A on americancatholic.org by Joseph M. Champlin, which is really the extent of my knowledge of the subject.

Since I'm not Catholic, annulment was never an issue with my parents, but it was for my husband's parents, who did get an annulment. My parents' divorce gave me a feeling of being invalid. Many children of divorce feel that their parents' divorce is somehow their fault. I never felt to blame exactly, but I felt irrelevant, unnecessary, extraneous. The love that created me didn't last. The love that was responsible for my existence failed. My parents never explicitly spoke or acted as if having children had been a mistake, and I know they always loved us, but I got the vague sense that they sometimes felt that their lives would be easier if they could just get a completely fresh start with no attachments of any kind to each other. It sometimes felt like they wished they could divorce us too. An annulment, however, takes this feeling a step further. If your parents' marriage is annuled, then it means that the love that created you didn't just fail; it was fundamentally inadequate from its very conception. Here's a quote from the American Catholic article I linked above:

"The Catholic Church presumes that marriages are valid, binding spouses for life. When couples do separate and divorce, therefore, the Church examines in detail their marriage to determine if, right from the start, some essential element was missing in their relationship. If that fact has been established, it means the spouses did not have the kind of marital link that binds them together for life."

When the Church affirms your parents' divorce with an annulment, they are saying to you that your parents may have loved each other, and their marriage may have been legally valid, but on the most meaningful spiritual level, it never even existed. Your parents never had the "marital link that binds them together for life." The Church is also telling your parents that. In fact, Champlin urges couples to consider the circumstances surrounding their marriage this way:

"Was there something missing right from the start, something radically wrong from day one? Before the wedding, were there warning signals, red flags which you may have dismissed simply as the cold-feet anxieties rather common for couples prior to a nuptial service? Did you suffer deep difficulties early in your marital life and worry about them, but, never having been married before, judged they were merely the expected burdensome part of marriage? Now, perhaps years later, you view them as symptomatic of a much more serious problem, a radical malfunctioning in your relationship."

The qualifier, "never having been married before" implies that a previous marriage might impart greater wisdom and help one to recognize the difference between normal marriage trials and and "radical malfunctioning." Yet the failure rate of second marriages is higher than the failure rate of first marriages, so this can't be true. Practicing marriage doesn't appear to make one better at it. Marriage doesn't work that way. Of course the experience would impart its lessons that may or may not help in some way when one is married a second time, but ultimately, marriage is not a skill, it's a commitment. Maintaining a commitment requires maturity, regardless of any particular knowledge or wisdom.

Reading the passage above gave me chills, imagining my in-laws being urged to think about their marriage as being fatally flawed from the beginning. It's no wonder the question of the children's legitimacy is so often raised by parents being encouraged to view their failed marriage this way. Here is the answer from the article to the question, "Does an annulment make the children illegitimate?"

"No. The parents, now divorced, presumably once obtained a civil license and entered upon a legal marriage. Children from that union are, therefore, their legitimate offspring. Legitimate means “legal.” The civil divorce and the Church annulment do not alter this situation. Nor do they change the parents’ responsibility toward the children. In fact, during annulment procedures the Church reminds petitioners of their moral obligation to provide for the proper upbringing of their children.

Nevertheless, persons pondering the Catholic annulment process do often express this concern about the legitimacy of the children after that procedure. It’s a
persistent rumor."

Perhaps the persistence of this rumor is related to the fact that children of an annuled marriage may feel spiritually illegitimate. Our parents may have followed civil law, and therefore, we are legitimate in the eyes of the law, but what does the Church have to say about the spiritual legitimacy of our family and even our existence? If the marriage never really existed in a spiritual sense, then wasn't our conception some kind of sin? Our parents must have made some kind of mistake for us to be dealing with this outcome. If marrying each other in the first place was their main mistake, then where exactly does that leave the conception of children within this fundamentally flawed marriage?

Jesus declared remarriage to be adultery, and said that no man should separate what God has joined. This is apparently why the Catholic Church feels the need to annul prior marriages before they can sanction remarriages. I respect this approach to divorce far more than the one taken by the church I was raised in. However, the Catholic approach seems to be even harder on the children. Not only is the Church telling you that your parents never had a true marriage, but it's practically telling your parents that the failure of their marriage wasn't their fault. The Church is saying that the marriage was so fatally flawed from the beginning that it wasn't a real marriage, and there is nothing the couple could have done to make it one.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that my mother-in-law is having the exact same marital troubles in her second marriage that she had in her first.

The Catholic theology of marriage is solid. I imagine the problem with annulments is reflective of the wider problem of divorce in our society. It makes sense that the Church would not want to alienate large numbers of the faithful in the wake of the divorce revolution by refusing to allow most of their divorced members to remarry. It seems that no-fault divorce laws put the Church between a rock and a hard place. Still, I have a very hard time believing that so many marriages, including that of my in-laws, were spiritually invalid. I have a hard time believing that so many of our parents simply entered fatally flawed marriages that they couldn't possibly have maintained.

I found this part of the article about possible grounds for annulment to be the saddest:

"For example, a couple, discovering her pregnancy, decide to marry; only much later do they recognize the lack of wisdom in that decision."

Two people create a child and then decide to marry to raise that child, and that displays a lack of wisdom? I recognize that lots of people marry someone that isn't an ideal match due to pregnancy, but doesn't the lack of wisdom in those cases rest more in their decision to engage in unprotected premarital sex? Or, more appropriate to Catholic teaching, premarital sex of any kind? Champlin, although surely well-intentioned, has essentially disconnected childrearing from marriage. Surely, such cases where poor marriages are formed to raise a child conceived under less than ideal circumstances are unfortunate, but I still believe that anyone who marries to raise a child that they have conceived is doing something admirable, even if their marriage does fail in the end. I would rather see a church acknowledge divorce and the fact that people can separate what God has joined, even though they shouldn't, rather than see a church declare failed marriages to be fatally flawed from the start.

Most of all, I'd like to see a church that believes divorce is a sin and remarriage is adultery, yet treats the divorced and remarried with respect and compassion, making sure to articulate that the love in a good second marriage, if it is indeed a good one, outweighs the sin of adultery that it also embodies, and that although their situation is less than ideal, the two people in it are loved and forgiven by God and the church. Such a church would also reach out to the children so they don't have to feel that their parents' failures reflect on them. If I ever find a church like that, I just might join it.

Gay Marriage Debate Recap

I think I've pretty much finished up the debate I entered on gay marriage over at Marriage Debate. I've come away with a better understanding of two of the main arguments for gay marriage.

My first opponent was Mark B. In the end, we came to essentially agree that the crux of our disagreement was that I believe that the core purpose of marriage is procreation and he doesn't. That is a position I can respect, even though I completely disagree with it. However, this passage of his was especially revealing to me:

"Of course, I'm torn here - part of me naturally wants to persuade you to my point of view, but another part of me says the more anti-SSM campaigners there are being cheerfully frank about the fact that they expect married couples to procreate whether they want to or not, the more like fringe nutters they'll look, and the quicker SSM will be instituted."

I replied with the following:

"I do believe that a childless marriage is regrettable, even if it was a conscious choice. I would respect that choice, and I'm certainly not interested in forcing anyone to procreate. But it is sad when a couple chooses not to have children or is unable to. Partially because procreation is necessary for the survival of the human race. But also, a child growing in a woman's womb as a result of an act of love is an absolute miracle, and it's sad when a couple doesn't care to partake of it. Does that make me a 'fringe nutter?'"

His response:

"In a milquetoast, damning-with-faint-praise sort of way, yes. You apparently value the abstract beauty of the idea of people having kids more than actual people and what they want for themselves."

So, apparently Mark B. feels that I am a fringe nutter, a radical even, just not a very assertive one. This is exactly the same accusation I've encountered in the past from conservative fundamentalists on other issues. Such is the life of a moderate. Fundamentalists of all stripes can't perceive nuance. To them, it's simply an abstraction, not even real, just wishy-washy. They can only deal with black and white. You get gray with them and you'll lose them. It makes no sense to Mark B. that I can hold an ideal in my head and feel disappointment when someone fails to live up that ideal, yet at the same time respect the people who have thusly failed. To him, having ideals equals not valuing real people.

But the miracle of birth is not really an abstraction. Anyone who has been present when a new life comes into this world can attest to how real it is. And the fact that procreation is necessary for the continuation of the human race is most certainly not an abstraction. Furthermore, I don't expect married couples to procreate whether they want to or not. I expect them to want to. Some don't, and I respect their feelings. But those feelings can and do change. Most people do want to have children, and again, this is why we have a procreative institution called marriage.

It's pretty funny that Mark B. believes my thinking is on the fringe. It's quite the opposite; I'm very mainstream. Anyone who has ever gotten married can testify to the fact that the question you get asked over and over again from there on after is, "So, when are you going to have kids?" People have been assuming that married people will procreate for the whole of human history, and it never led to the speedy introduction of same-sex marriage. Mark B.'s argument for same-sex marriage will not catch on among the plain old Midwesterners I know.

My second opponent was much more intelligent and respectful, and his/her argument much more compelling. Here are his/her comments regarding my concern about procreation being separated from marriage:

"I do not believe your concern is irrelevant. What I differ from you on is timing and causation. I believe that procreation has already been seperated from marriage by divorce and especially by contraception. The horse has left the building so to speak because it'll be a frosty day in the lake of fire when heterosexuals contenance their access to those two things being impeded. I sympathize with your concern and if this was the 1930's marriage we were talking about I'd agree that gay marriage might detatch procreation from marriage. But it is 2007 my dear lady. Procreation has been detatched for at least a quarter century now."

This is a valid argument that could catch on among the people I know. The poster clearly explains that gay marriage is a natural and logical step in the same direction we've already taken regarding marriage, in the wake of divorce and contraception. I'd also add cohabitation to that list. He/she says that procreation has already been significantly detached from marriage. We are in total agreement on this point. However, the poster feels that since we've already had these changes, and most heterosexuals are not willing to relinquish their unfettered access to these options, then we have to take the next logical step of same-sex marriage. The argument is cogent and compelling, especially in light of most people's desire to treat all people fairly.

However, I don't accept that heterosexuals will never give up no-fault divorce laws or ubiquitous contraception and cohabitation, even though I acknowledge that it is certainly an uphill battle. I plan to present a different culture of marriage to my own children, as much as is possible in the current environment. And I hope to challenge people's assumptions about the changes to marriage and sex that we've seen in the last quarter century and to consider these things in relation to the same-sex marriage debate.

Gay marriage is but one part of the marriage culture I hope to challenge on this blog and in my personal life.