Marriage and Procreation: On Children As The First Purpose of Marriage - October 20, 2004

So much of what follows this passage (find it in its entirety in the link) supports finding ways to get around this basic and accurate argument that gay marriage should be banned because of non-procreation is a poor argument. What follows here, though, is the meat of that discussion, showing how any attempts by folks to say gay marriage should be banned because marriage is meant only for sanctifying procreation is entirely laughable:



"When Massachusetts officials facing the court case Goodridge v. Department of Public Health set out to defend that state's marriage law from a challenge by seven homosexual couples, their major line of defense was procreation. Making babies, the state argued, was the first purpose of marriage. By definition, same-sex partners could not create a child as a couple. This was important, the argument continued, because children usually do best when growing up with their two natural parents. Moreover, requiring fertility tests before marriage by opposite-sex couples would be cumbersome and overly intrusive. It was better to let all otherwise qualified opposite-sex couples to marry than to go down that troubling regulatory path.

And the initial trial court, let us remember, agreed with the state. The judge ruled that the primary purpose of marriage, under Massachusetts law, was in fact procreation. Accordingly, the court concluded that the state could reasonably distinguish between homosexual claimants to marriage and those heterosexual couples that were at least "theoretically ... capable" of procreation without relying on "inherently more cumbersome" non-coital reproductive methods.[1]

Even Evan Wolfson, the acknowledged leader of the "gay marriage" movement, has agreed that:

At first glance, the "basic biology" argument seems to make some sense. After all, it doesn't take more than a fourth-grade health class education to know that men's and women's bodies in some sense "complement each other" and that when a man and a woman come "together as one flesh" it often leads to procreation.[2]
But of course, the trial court decision did not survive appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. This higher court, on a 4-3 vote, dismissed the procreation argument, pointing to opposite-sex couples in which the woman was over childbearing age or otherwise infertile. Could the state "rationally" tell them that they could not marry? It could not. Indeed, the court noted that, under state law, even those "who cannot stir from their death bed may marry," provided they were of the opposite sex. Moreover, infertility is not grounds for divorce, and so by inference it is not a bar to marriage, either. In addition, the court noted that Massachusetts law protects the parental rights of homosexuals and allows same-sex couples to adopt children. It was irrational for the state to enable "gay parenting" while also denying the children involved the benefits of "family stability and economic security" found in a marital home.

Evan Wolfson also moves on to dissect the procreation argument, finding it "riddled with holes." If procreation is the purpose of marriage, he argues, then the marriages of Bob and Elizabeth Dole, John and Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Pat and Shelley Buchanan should all be declared invalid. So should the marriage of the father of our country, George Washington, to Martha, which produced no children. Another same-sex activist, Dale Carpenter, argues that if there were any merit to the procreation argument:

We would require prospective married couples to sign an affidavit stating that they are able to procreate and intend to procreate. If in, say, 10 years they had not procreated, we could presume they are unable or unwilling to do so and could dissolve the marriage as unworthy of the unique institution.
He adds that since no one has really proposed this, or anything like it, it is clear that the defenders of marriage "do not take the narrow procreationist view of marriage very seriously." Instead, he says, the traditionalists impose another rule: "Nobody is required to procreate in order to marry, except gay couples." Such discrimination, he implies, could not survive a test by the "equal protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment.[3] Indeed, that usually faithful, conservative Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, in his 2003 dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, noted:

If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is 'no state interest' for purposes of proscribing [private adult sex], what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.[4]
It is fair to conclude, I think, that the procreation argument is in serious trouble."