Why There Is No Natural Right To Gay Marriage
Homosexual relationships cannot be marriages because they do not actually include sex nor produce children.
This excerpt comes from False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America, available from Regnery Publishing for order now and everywhere books are sold June 18.
Like the social compact—citizens’ agreement to form a society that secures their rights—marriage works to secure citizens’ rights. Pertinent to our topic, the natural right to marry descends from the right to pursue happiness. As we have seen, marriage also contributes to developing the character citizens need for self-government. Thus “the founders held marriage to be not ‘arguably’ but indispensably necessary for the securing of natural rights,” [historian and Hillsdale College professor Thomas G.] West notes.
History demonstrates that blood ties tend to provide the most security and joy available in human life. They are the foundation of every culture and society. Societies emerge from family stability and expansion, as families grow into “clans” or “tribes,” which sometimes turn into nations.
Marriage also directs dangerous sexual energies into productive behavior, which benefits everyone in multiple ways. In the first place, it reduces jealousies and social controversies—what we might call “drama.” People who don’t cheat on each other or change sexual partners contribute to social peace.
Marriage also tends to improve the character of the spouses and the children their marriage begets. Due to an intimacy unlike any other, husbands and wives can learn how to love others more intimately than single people can. Children learn from their parents’ direction how to be less selfish, lazy, and cruel, and more kind, thoughtful, and self-disciplined. Parents tend to give their children close personal attention because they naturally love their children in a way that strangers and neighbors naturally don’t.
Marriage also reduces poverty. It legally joins two people who can work together to provide for the family they create. Poor people are more likely to violate others’ natural rights, either by stealing or by obtaining others’ property through welfare. And people who make children without first marrying are the most likely to be poor.
The Founders were less attentive to what people did naked behind closed doors than to the costs and penalties that their private sexual choices might impose on the public: children created without a secure legal attachment to the support, care, and protection of their biological mother and father. While laws in the Founders’ era criminalized premarital sex and homosexual acts, West notes that “they were hardly ever enforced except when behavior became ‘open and notorious.’” The Founding generation’s prime legal concern with sex was its potential either to damage or to secure others’ rights.
“A 1781 Maryland law embodies the founding orientation,” West explains “In this law, the cost of welfare for single mothers is the sole concern, not the act of fornication itself. The immorality that is subject to legal penalties is not the indiscretion of the individual, but harming the rights of others by bearing a child without adequate means of support.”
The Founders’ government paid close attention to marriage and sex because they naturally generate children. Not only does “a lasting community need[] children who will become the next generation of citizens,” “From the perspective of the social compact, the main purpose of the ‘union of the parents’ is the ‘common care’ of the children,” West writes. Because the best environment for the next generation of citizens to grow up in is a home headed by their married father and mother, the state has a strong interest in promoting robust marriage laws and penalizing breaches of the marital agreement such as abandonment and adultery.
Marriage cannot be a natural right for homosexuals because homosexual interactions cannot create a family. Homosexual relationships can never produce natural children, nor any of the family relationships that extend from procreative capacity (aunts, uncles, cousins, grandchildren, and so forth). This removes a key reason for government to acknowledge or preference homosexual encounters.
There is no government interest in a sexual relationship that has no capacity to produce children. It’s purely a private matter. Since homosexual activities cannot possibly produce a child, there’s no government interest in, nor a natural right to, those activities.
In contrast, the organic capacity to produce kids means that there are serious public consequences to any male-female sexual relationship. Even heterosexual couples using contraception can—and often do—make children together. Yet no homosexual interaction can ever generate children.
Sex is a scientific term for the procreative act. Homosexual relations are not—and never can be—procreative acts. Homosexuals can never physically unite in the way that a man and woman can, nor fulfill that physical unity in the form of a naturally resulting child. So homosexual relationships cannot be marriages because they do not actually include sex nor produce children; therefore, there is no natural right to those relationships that governments must affirm.
The public interest attached to marriage arises because lifelong marriages between one man and one woman are by far the most effective way of creating self-governing, competent, happy children as the next generation of citizens. No other form of sexual relationship improves on natural marriages, statistically speaking.
In fact, the vast majority of criminals are created by sexual relationships in which the parents fail to commit to each other for life for the good of the children. Lack of marriage between biological parents is also responsible for the vast majority of poverty, mental illness, suicide, and all other manner of deficits that seriously threaten citizens’ natural rights. Society and government have a strong interest in ensuring that as many children as possible are born into the homes of their married biological parents who stay committed for life.
Those who would argue that homosexuals’ pursuit of happiness requires state licensing of their relationships need to argue that those relationships have a public benefit. They also need to grapple with the Founders’ Aristotelian understanding of the word “happiness,” which is different from what it means today. Aristotle famously defined happiness as “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.” The Founders understood happiness this way as well. So, to argue for erasing sex distinctions in marriage as a natural right requires a complete argument for sodomy and mutual masturbation as activities of the soul in accord with virtue. Answering that argument would require another book, or several, but suffice it to say that it’s not self-evident, and the Founders would never have accepted such an argument.
Absent a credible case for the positive virtue of homosexual sex acts, the fact that homosexual encounters cannot produce children should suffice to demonstrate that the state has no legitimate natural rights–based interest in such private behavior. Indeed, the fact that a high percentage of the population is now satisfying their sexual desires through encounters that cannot produce children creates an existential crisis for a nation, which will soon have no children to continue its existence. This is the direction of all Western, and Westernized, nations already.
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