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What marriage is.

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COMMON sense suggests it is better for homosexually oriented persons to settle into permanent relationships than to have multiple partners. But can such relationships become marriages? I do not believe that they can. Jonathan Rauch makes the affirmative case, and puts forth the best argument I've seen in its favor. But even granting the scientific and philosophical assumptions that undergird his recent book on the subject, the argument cannot stand. His key assumptions--that homosexuals have a fixed nature that inclines them toward same-sex relationships; that this nature is involuntary and unchangeable; that it prevents homosexuals from being other than homosexual; and that it is the same sort of nature as what makes heterosexuals the way they are--rest on unsettled scientific and philosophical foundations. However, I am willing to grant them for the sake of brevity. The key problems in Rauch's case have less to do with such matters, and more to do with his underlying philosophy of secular humanism.

I speak as a long-standing conversant with Rauch on the subject. Let me begin by allowing the author to describe my position, as I voiced it to him one evening recounted in his book:

Not long ago I had dinner with a friend who is a devout Christian. He ... knows and likes gay people, and has warmed to the idea of civil unions. But when I asked him about gay marriage, he replied with a firm no. I asked if he imagined there was anything I could say that might budge him. He thought for a moment and then said no again. Why? Because, he said, male-female marriage is a sacrament from God. It predates the Constitution and every other law of man. We could not, in that sense, change it even if we wanted to. I asked if it might alter his conclusion to reflect that legal marriage is a secular institution, that the separation of church and state requires us to distinguish God's law from civil law, and that we must refrain from using law to impose one group's religious precepts on the rest of society. He shook his head. No, he said. This is bigger than that. I felt he had not answered my argument....

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