Marriage As a Social Construction

When traditional marriage is merely a social construction, no principled reason keeps the state from permitting virtually any marital union.  For example, marital arrangements that include two brothers, two sisters, a mother and a son, a father and a son, a mother and a daughter, or a grandfather and a grandson, would be consistent with the philosophical assumptions undergirding the same-sex marriage defense.

And this is not all.  Nor is a polygamous marriage of one man and numerous spouses--which also may include his mother, his grandmother, his grandfather, as well as his adult daughter and son--inconsistent with the same-sex marriage worldview.  Given sexual politics today, one can easily imagine polygamy being reintroduced by an appeal to the sad plight of the bisexual, a person who is incapable of fulfilling his or her marital aspirations with merely one spouse of one gender.  The rhetorical question could be raised: Why should he or she be forbidden from marrying the ones he or she loves?

Of course, we cannot ignore the marital rights of the person who has a deep and abiding affection for the family pet, for then the animal-rights crowd may pipe up and accuse us of speciesism, the prejudice favoring human beings over nonhuman animals.

To be blunt, the state and its institutions (including public schools) could not say that a heterosexual monogamous couple raising three young children in a traditional Christian, Jewish, or Muslim home is a better arrangement for the moral ecology of the community than the marital union of a father and four of his adult children who make their living producing pornographic films of their sexual encounters.  After all, they are all adult consenters, nobody is being coerced, and the state should not prefer one sexual lifestyle over another.

We believe these counterintuitive results occur because most proponents of same-sex marriage presuppose that marriage and family are merely matters of convention and positive law.  That is, because family and marital arrangements aren't particularly sacrosanct or normative, individual members of society may tinker with them as long as they don't interfere with other people's choices.  The state must be "neutral" and assume no overarching good or purpose to human life, relationships, and communities.  Thus those who uphold the philosophy of same-sex marriage must be willing to embrace marital and familial anarchy.


Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, “Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air,” pg.121-122