We've already redefined marriage, by accepting contraception

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | May 01, 2015

In a must-read column for the Wall Street Journal, Rev. Donald Sensing, a Methodist minister from Tennessee, argues that acceptance of same-sex marriage “will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.”

Understand that Rev. Sensing is not happy with the situation as he sees it. “I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God,” he writes. But he argues persuasively that the public understanding of marriage was doomed when society accepted the Pill, and thereby severed the link between marriage and procreation. Marriage, he observes, had traditionally been recognized and protected by society as the only institution in which sexual intercourse—and, therefore, child-bearing—was sanctioned.

”Society's stake in marriage as an institution is nothing less than the perpetuation of the society itself, a matter of much greater than merely private concern,” Rev. Sensing writes. But once contraception became the norm, and procreation was deemed incidental, the fundamental reason for legal protection of marriage was obscured.

Today, marriage is generally understood as a social and legal contract between two people: nothing more. (In fact marriage is the only legal contract that society does not enforce; either partner can break the bond with impunity.) “But what weddings do not do any longer,” Rev. Sensing remarks, “is give to a man and a woman society’s permission to have sex and procreate.”

In today’s America, an increasingly large proportion of young people believe that they have permission to have sex whenever they want, with whomever they want. As for procreation, that too is taking place, more and more frequently, outside the bounds of wedlock.

But public attitudes could change, as they have changed in the past 50 years, and a change in attitudes could lead to another change in laws. So consider Rev. Sensing’s insight from a different perspective. Imagine that, sometime in the future, our society decides that some permission should be required before couples have sex and procreate.

Reflect on that possibility for just a moment, and you realize that, while our society is very unlikely to impose new restrictions on sex, it isn’t nearly so far-fetched to imagine restrictions on the right to have children. A government that is arrogant enough to re-define marriage is surely arrogant enough to require licensing for child-bearing. And if the marital contract means nothing more than what the government says it means, then marriage does not ensure the right to have children.

Do you want to live in a society in which the government decides who should have children, and when, and how many? If not, you should worry about the future of marriage law. As Rev. Sensing demonstrates, you should worry not only about what the Supreme Court may do, but about what has already been done.