WHY "GAY MARRIAGE" IS WRONG

By Robert A. J. Gagnon, Ph.D. | July 2004

Advocates of homosexual practice often argue that "gay marriage," or at least homosexual civil unions, will reduce promiscuity and promote fidelity among homosexual persons. Such an argument overlooks two key points.

"GAY MARRIAGE" AS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS

First, legal and ecclesiastical embrace of homosexual unions is more likely to undermine the institution of marriage and produce other negative effects than it is to make fidelity and longevity the norm for homosexual unions. We will come back to this later.

Second, and even more importantly, homosexual unions are not wrong primarily because of their disproportionately high incidence of promiscuity (especially among males) and breakups (especially among females). They are wrong because "gay marriage" is a contradiction in terms. As with consensual adult incest and polyamory, considerations of commitment and fidelity factor only after certain structural prerequisites are met.

The vision of marriage found in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is one of reuniting male and female into an integrated sexual whole. Marriage is not just about more intimacy and sharing one's life with another in a lifelong partnership. It is about sexual merger - or, in Scripture's understanding, re-merger - of essential maleness and femaleness.

The creation story in Genesis 2:18-24 illustrates this point beautifully. An originally binary, or sexually undifferentiated, adam ("earthling") is split down the "side" (a better translation of Hebrew tsela than "rib") to form two sexually differentiated persons. Marriage is pictured as the reunion of the two constituent parts or "other halves," man and woman.

This is not an optional or minor feature of the story. Since the only difference created by the splitting is a differentiation into two distinct sexes, the only way to reconstitute the sexual whole, on the level of erotic intimacy, is to bring together the split parts. A same-sex erotic relationship can never constitute a marriage because it will always lack the requisite sexual counterparts or complements.

SCRIPTURE, CREATION, AND A TWO-SEXES PREREQUISITE

The New Testament recognizes the importance of the Genesis creation stories for establishing a "two-sexes" or "other-sex" prerequisite for marriage.

St. Paul clearly understood same-sex intercourse as an affront to the Creator's stamp on gender in Genesis 1-2. In his letter to the Romans, Paul cites two prime examples of humans suppressing the truth about God evident in creation/nature: idolatry and same-sex intercourse (1:18-27).

THE SOCIAL-SCIENTIFIC CASE AGAINST "GAY MARRIAGE"

Returning to the first point, the social-scientific evidence to date does not encourage the notion that validating homosexual unions is a win-win situation. A series of articles in 2004 by Stanley Kurtz, a Harvard-trained social anthropologist and fellow at the Hoover Institution, show that the introduction of same-sex registered partnerships in Scandinavia has coincided with a sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births.

In Denmark about 60% of firstborn children now have unmarried parents. Since the introduction of registered partnerships in the Netherlands in 1997, out-of-wedlock births have increased annually there by two percentage points - double the average annual increase of the previous 15 years.

Moreover, a 2004 study of divorce rates for same-sex registered partnerships in Sweden from 1995 to 2002 indicates that, compared to opposite-sex married couples, male homosexual couples were 1.5 times more likely to divorce and female homosexual couples 3 times more likely.

CONCLUSION

In sum, why is "gay marriage" wrong? Most importantly, the idea of "gay marriage" is an oxymoron and a rejection of a core value in Judeo-Christian sexual ethics. Marriage requires the two sexes to reconstitute a sexual whole.

© 2004 Robert A. J. Gagnon