LOVE AND MARRIAGE: Maggie Gallagher replies to Matt DeMonte

In the classic (or what Don Browning now calls the "full-integration") western model of marriage (aka the Catholic model and derivations therefrom), marriage IS about love. The three goals/goods of marriage are sexual satisfaction (or relief from lust), caring love between the man and the woman, and children. Marriage is the word for the way we attempt to unite all these goods.

But what has this to do with the modern liberal secular state's interest in marriage? Why do we have laws about it? Why out of all the different kinds of loving, intimate relations people have or could imagine having, does the state try to benefit and burden with regulation this one kind of human relation? What's love got to do with it?

The state's interest in marriage primarily arises from the fact that sex between men and women makes babies. Irregularly, now, but still frequently, and without any particular intention on the part of the parties involved. (4 out of 10 woman ages 40 to 44 in this country have had an unintended birth).

Every society, including ours, needs a way to regulate those sexual relations that produce (or might produce, if unregulated) children. The alternative is widespread unmet dependency needs on the part of children and/or the absence of the next generation (aka depopulation).

That men and women fall in love and in lust is a fact of nature. Marriage is a creative cultural response to deal with this fact of nature.

The existence of a legal category called marriage regulates even the behavior of those who are not married, signalling to young people the condictions under which they should intensify or alternatively might cease those extremely onerous efforts (abstinence, devout contraception) needed to prevent the unmarried births, and indeed might even be welcomed for doing so.

posted by Eve at 7:01 PM VOTE

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