The obligatory post on gay marriage

So here goes:

This will probably be a multi-post “series” and I try to work this out. 

Here’s the basic starting point:  marriage is fundamentally about children.  Always has been.  Yes, it’s true that the nobility in the middle ages used the pre-existing instution of marriage to force dynastic alliances.  But that doesn’t mean that the purpose of marriage was forming dynastic alliances. 

And when I mean “about children” I really mean that marriage was the means to tie men to their children.  That’s why children born in a marriage are legally assumed to be fathered by the husband of the mother. 

Now, for the past generation, the notion that children should be born to married parents and married couples should have children as been abandoned by a large segment of the population.  There’s some author out there who essentially says that American society is splitting into two, one half (middle class and religious/traditional families) continuing to marry, and the other half (the poor and working class, especially but not exclusively Hispanics and blacks) either not marrying at all, or doing so out-of-sequence and not necessarily to the mother/father of their children.  And this change has happened so thoroughly that they’re befuddled by the concept that a woman should be married before contemplating having children.  (“Promises I Can Keep”, about poor women who see having children as entirely separate from being married, is very eye-opening in this respect.) 

At the same time, without having done any research, I suspect that the mainstream acceptance of the idea of being married, but never having any intention of having children is relatively new, in the grand scheme of things.  Periodically, there are even advice-column letters along the lines of “my husband and I agreed never to have children, but now I’m unintentionally pregnant, and I’m afraid he’ll flip out.  Should I just get the abortion now and not even tell him?”

And all of this is not even addressing the increase in divorce since no-fault divorce became the law of the land, and the conventional wisdom changed from “stay together for the sake of the kids” to “children are happier if their parents are happier, so get your divorce, pursue your dreams, and they’ll be just fine.” 

All of which leads gay marriage advocates to say, “marriage has ceased to be about children a long time ago.  Like it or not, marriage is now about public recognition of a loving relationship, and a set of legal rights and benefits.  The horse is out of the barn.  You can’t turn back the clock.” 

And if  marriage is indeed about nothing more than provision of a set of legal rights and benefits to any two individuals as request it, then indeed there is no reason to limit those benefits to a man and a woman requesting them. 

In that case, then, the only questions left are (a) has marriage truly been redefined, or are we talking about something else, some new status which ought to have a new name so that “marriage” remains a legal recognition of the relationship of a mother and father committed to raising children together, and “romantic committed partnership” is what its name implies?  And (b) if marriage is the term that the law uses for “committed romantic partnership” then do the benefits and rights typically provided to married couples make sense in this new era — most notably, Social Security spouse’s and survivor’s benefits which were initially based on the assumption that the wife is dependent on her husband for support?

BUT that just begs the question (“beg the question” is so misused that I’m not entirely sure I’m using it correctly):  can we really not turn back the clock?  Is it really too late to undo this transformation of marriage and childbearing?  Is there nothing we can do to return to a situation in which men and women wait until they’re married to procreate? — especially if a large segment of the population doesn’t even see that as a problem.  I’ll try to figure that out in a later post.