MARRIAGE DEBATE: Maggie Gallagher is guest-blogging on same-sex marriage at the Volokh Conspiracy. Maggie–my new ex-boss, so if you want my resume, drop me a line!–may be the most brilliant person I’ve ever met. She’s insightful, intellectually honest, steeped in the current research on marriage and family life, and… yeah, I could go on, but really you should just read her posts. The Volokh.com posts are kind of disconnected, a problem made worse by the blog-protocol of posts appearing in reverse chronological order, so I suggest that people read from the bottom up. (You can get just Maggie’s posts at this link, but since a few other Volokhites have chimed in, you might not want to do it that way.) If you want more, there is an excellent debate between Maggie and Jonathan Rauch here. …Next week, Dale Carpenter will respond to Maggie’s posts, at Volokh.com.

Here’s a small tidbit from an early Maggie post:

Here’s my short answer: marriage serves many private and individual purposes. But its great public purpose, the thing that justifies its existence as a unique legal status, is protecting children and society by creating sexual unions in which children are (practically) guaranteed the love and care of their own mother and father.

The vast majority of children born to married couples begin life with their own mother and fathers committed to jointly caring for them. Only a minority of children in other sexual unions (and none in same-sex unions) get this benefit.

Sex makes babies. Society needs babies. Babies need fathers as well as mothers. That’s the heart of marriage as a universal human institution.

Please note: Procreation is not the definition of marriage. It is the reason for marriage’s existence as a public (and yes legal) institution. People who don’t have children can still really be married (just as people who aren’t married can and do have babies).

But if sex between men and women did not make babies, then marriage would not be a universal human institution, or a legal status in America. Yes, many people like intimacy–is that a good reason for the government to stamp the good housekeeping seal of approval on certain intimate relationships, but not others?

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