Now that we know how we ended up with gay marriage, we can awkwardly transition into a conversation about why there is no gay marriage. There is no such thing as gay marriage and there can never be any such thing as gay marriage. “Gay” is simply not a modifier that can be attached to “marriage.”

We have something we call gay marriage, but the entire problem with gay marriage existing is that it can’t exist. There can no more be gay marriage than there can be a rounded square or a triangular cube. And if the government set out to decree that a circle is a square or that a triangle is a cube, I would oppose it for the same reason I oppose gay marriage. Although squares would remain squares and cubes cubes, the effect such a law would have on the field of geometry would be similar to the effect gay marriage has on the institution of marriage.

It’s important to establish that the argument is about the nature of marriage, not the nature of law or human rights or love or anything else. It is a bit late now, years after gay marriage was enacted across the land by Supreme proclamation, to finally clarify what the argument was actually about, but if we ever hope to legally restore the “traditional” definition of marriage, we must be clear on this point. The defenders of the “traditional” definition, as we’ve seen, largely gave up defending it, and many of those who remained were not effective because they did not understand what they were defending.

So, two notes of clarification at the outset.

1. Nobody ever wanted to make gay marriage illegal.

You’ll notice that nobody—at least from what I saw—went around insisting that gay marriage be “prohibited” or “criminalized.” That’s because the argument over whether gay marriage should be legal or illegal is a false dichotomy, constructed and promoted by progressives and gay activists. They rather successfully framed it as an argument between two different but valid versions of marriage. You have “traditional marriage” on one side and “gay marriage” on the other. According to progressives, the traditional-marriage proponents are bullies who want to exclude the gay version of marriage.

But the object was never to make gay marriage illegal but rather to communicate that it is not possible. Marriage is, fundamentally, intrinsically, inherently, in principle, the permanent monogamous union between members of the opposite sex. That is what it is. Marriage is a thing. An Actual, Real Thing. And as An Actual, Real Thing, it has characteristics and qualities; it has a concrete purpose, an objective function.

It was always the purpose, function, and characteristic of marriage that “excluded” gays, never the law. We’ll return to the true nature of marriage later on in this chapter.

All the proponents of “traditional marriage” were asking for was a government that recognizes the reality of marriage. That was certainly not a plea for more government “involvement” or government intrusion, but for less. For the State to ratify, acknowledge, and afford a special status to the marriage between a man and a woman isn’t “intrusive.” After all, the government recognizes me as a human being, doesn’t it? I don’t feel intruded upon just because the State affords me the legal status of a person, rather than, say, a houseplant or a porcupine.

I don’t want the government “involved” in my marriage. I am not asking for a state-appointed representative to come to my house and oversee the whole arrangement. What I want is for the government to simply recognize the institution, generally speaking, because it is a real thing and an important thing and there is no credible reason for the government to deny its existence. There is nothing wrong with the State saying, “Our country needs children, children need parents, and parents need to be married to provide stability for their children, so we will do certain things to protect and encourage this valuable institution.” The only problem is that it offends the emotional sensibilities of some people, but that is not actually a real problem. It is a problem only for the person who is offended, and her problem should not be our problem.

The real intrusion or “involvement” occurs when the government decides not to recognize things for what they are. It’s when human beings aren’t recognized as human beings—like unborn humans, for instance—that the government intrudes. The intrusion is when the State ignores or attempts to change or pervert the nature of something. That’s when you get slavery, abortion, and yes, gay marriage.

2. I am not and never was a proponent of “traditional marriage.”

In fact, it was a grave mistake that we ever started using the phrase. I’ve used it in this chapter already several times, which shows how effective the Left can be at framing the debate. Even when I argue against how they frame the debate, I’m still arguing according to how they framed it.

Just as there is no such thing as gay marriage, there is no such thing as traditional marriage.

You wouldn’t take your kids to the zoo and say, “Oh look, kids, it’s a traditional penguin,” would you?

You don’t go to the doctor and say, “Doc, my traditional elbow hurts,” do you?

If your child is doing his math homework and writes down that 2 + 2 = 4, you don’t say, “Yes, that’s traditional arithmetic,” do you?

No, because to tack “traditional” onto something is to imply that there are completely legitimate nontraditional versions of it.

Traditional marriage isn’t traditional—it’s real, it’s actual, it’s marriage. It’s the only kind that exists or can ever exist.

Marriage isn’t a flavor of barbecue sauce. Yes, there are traditional barbecue sauces and ones infused with different spices and flavors, and they’re all still entirely barbecue sauces. But that’s not marriage. Marriage is no more “traditional” than gravity is traditional. We shouldn’t refer to “traditional marriage” any more than we should look down at the splattered remains of someone who jumped out a window and say, “I guess they have traditional gravity around here.”

That’s because gravity is gravity. Gravity is a reality. So is marriage. There is marriage, and there is not marriage. Two men living together is not marriage. It’s not untraditional marriage—it’s just not marriage.

I would say the same about “biblical marriage.” It was a mistake—again, I know I’m Monday-morning quarterbacking this thing—to push so heavily on how the Bible defines marriage.

It is true, of course, that Christ himself defines it as a union between a man and a woman. From Matthew 19:

And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

It’s also true that Scripture expressly forbids and condemns the homosexual act. 1 Corinthians 6:9–11:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

And there’s Romans 1:26–28:

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

And 1 Timothy 1:10:

The sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine…

And so on.

But the truth of marriage is innate and accessible to all people, even those who have not read the Bible. We are discussing the nature of a human institution, its purpose, its function—this is not just a religious matter but a scientific and social one. The Bible provides great insight into this, but the truth of marriage is not true simply because the Bible said it. On the contrary, the Bible said it because it’s true.

It makes sense to talk about biblical marriage with Christians who deny what Scripture has to say on the subject. As believers we are commanded to acquiesce to the Word of God even if we do not agree, so those Christians should be reminded of their apostasy. But we were never going to convince the secular world to respect marriage by quoting Corinthians or throwing barbs from Leviticus. And the more we presented marriage as a matter of religious conviction, the more we vindicated their view that our opinion on marriage was just a product of religious conviction.

With those stipulations registered for the record, we can examine this “nature of marriage” thing I keep yammering on about.

THE NATURE OF MARRIAGE

Marriage is by definition between a man and a woman. That isn’t an arbitrary designation. It isn’t fueled by hate. It isn’t bigotry. It isn’t intolerance. The union between a man and a woman, in principle, has a power and a capacity that no other union could ever possess. For this reason it certainly is not “equal” to any other union.

A man and a woman can create other humans. They can form families. They can bring forth life. This difference is not an aberration or a matter of mere semantics. It’s something important, serious, and profound. It’s a matter of biological and anatomical truth to say that men and women were literally designed for one another.

Today we see children as a “punishment,” to use Barack Obama’s infamous phrase, or as a potential obstacle to be hurdled on the path toward sexual gratification. But the fact that a human life can be brought into existence through this relationship is, if nothing else, a sign that men and women are made to be compatible with one another. And it’s a sign that this compatibility is tremendously important, as the propagation of humanity depends on it. No other relationship bears that responsibility, and so no other relationship needs to be, or should be, put on an equal pedestal with it.

The man-woman relationship has a potential and a capacity that is completely unique. It has attributes that cannot be emulated by any other form of human relationship. In light of this, most societies have afforded it a certain respect, out of both necessity and sound philosophy, and this bond was given a name: marriage.

Marriage is the context in which families are formed and maintained. That’s why it’s important. That’s why it’s different. To “open up” the definition of marriage to include relationships—even relationships between individuals who share a strong emotional connection—that do not share these essential components is to actively undermine the family.

Marriage is the union between man and woman—two different but complementary people—made one flesh by the rite of matrimony, and bound together by their vows and their shared responsibility to create and maintain a properly ordered family. That is how marriage was defined in Western civilization for millennia. Gay marriage does not expand this definition. It abolishes it.

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH NOTHING

You’ll notice, by the way, that proponents of the new definition haven’t—except for tax purposes—actually offered a new definition. They’ve made their opposition to the “traditional” one known, but they will not suggest an alternative. For all this talk about the definition of marriage, it’s rather striking that only one side ever offered one.

If there is no alternative definition, if liberals cannot define this new thing they’ve created, then they must publicly admit their intention to obliterate the institution, not simply to “redefine” it. If they wish to keep the institution, however, then they must explain where the new lines will be drawn and—importantly—why.

Definitions require lines of distinction. If I’m going to define the word up, for instance, then I must come up with a definition that rudely excludes down. If I want to define cow, I must have a definition that discriminates against horses and aardvarks.

The “old” version of marriage drew a clear, obvious, logical, purposeful, meaningful, and objective line. What about the new? Is marriage merely a romantic agreement between two individuals who love each other? If so, that opens up a whole slew of alternate manifestations of marriage, which either leaves the definition so “open” as to fade it into oblivion, or else it requires the pioneers of this edited thing to begin making a thousand stipulations until, before long, they’re doing exactly what they accused us of doing, only they’re now doing it for increasingly arbitrary and superficial reasons.

IF GAY MARRIAGE, THEN PEDOPHILIA

They don’t like it when we say this, but it’s true: if marriage is not between one man and one woman, then you have to tell us what it is instead, and whatever it is, you won’t be able to include gay marriage in the new definition without letting things like incest and pedophilia and bestiality through the gate.

Yes, that’s an argument you’ve heard before. It’s a slippery-slope cliché. It’s offensive and insensitive. It’s also valid and unassailable. Really, this argument is an argument about arguments. It argues that the arguments you use in one scenario must be applied equally to all other relevant scenarios.

It works like this:

If you assert that X justifies A, then you have not only argued for A as an end but also for X as a means. You have said, “A is true and right, and I know that A is true and right because X is a legitimate way to ascertain the truth and rightness of something.”

I may then test both your end and your means by experimenting with X to see if it could also apply to a thing—Z—that we both find abhorrent. If it does, then either you were wrong about A or you were wrong that X justifies A—or you must accept that, in arguing for A, you have also argued for Z.

I feel like this is becoming an algebra equation, and as someone who needs a calculator to divide six by three, I fear I’m out of my league. Why don’t we examine this principle in a real-world situation?

Let’s say a Muslim challenges me to explain why it’s morally acceptable to consume pork. Let’s say I’m a horrible debater, so I defend my pig-eating ways by saying simply, “It tastes good and I like it.” If that’s the only argument I have at my intellectual disposal, the Muslim could easily win the argument and defeat my reasoning by pointing out that a cannibal probably eats a human because it tastes good and he likes it.

This astute challenger will have backed me into a rhetorical corner. Or, more accurately, I’ve backed myself into a corner by claiming that an act can be morally justified based on how much I enjoy it. This would force me to either come up with a better line of reasoning (I could say that I really hated the movie Babe and I think all pigs should die as retribution), or I’d have to accept his premise that I’m basically Jeffrey Dahmer because I had a pulled pork sandwich last Tuesday. What I can’t do is simply roll my eyes and say, “Yeah, but that’s, like, totally different.”

A vague dismissal does not a valid argument make. If you’re trying to challenge an age-old concept or drastically change an ancient institution, you need arguments for doing so that include your new amendment but still preclude other amendments that even you would find abhorrent.

G. K. Chesterton put it this way: “In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’ ”

The point is clear here. Gay marriage proponents want to tear down the fence, even though they don’t understand why it’s there. But when they tear it down, they’re going to want to rebuild it somewhere a bit farther down the road. But because they don’t know why it was put there in the first place, they won’t know where to put it now.

What we know for certain is that a thing cannot have two fundamental natures. A circle cannot be a square; even less can it be a circle and a square at the same time. A thing cannot be two things at once, and it cannot be denied that gay marriage and true marriage are two different things. Even those who do not see a moral or social problem with homosexual unions cannot honestly suggest that they notice nothing distinctive about heterosexual marriage.

AN OBVIOUS DISTINCTION

To be clear, the distinctions are as follows:

(1) One involves people of the same sex; the other does not.

(2) In one there is never any possibility of procreation; in the other there is.

Those are a couple of solid differences. You may call them irrelevant, but you cannot say they are not differences. You may say they are insignificant, but you cannot say they are fictitious.

But are they in fact insignificant and irrelevant?

It’s fascinating that we would ask such a question. This is a country where we go out and buy new iPhones because they’re slightly different from the iPhones we bought fourteen months ago. We pay for upgraded seats on an airplane because they’re slightly better than the seats three rows back. We cry discrimination and persecution if we find out that our coworker makes slightly more than us, or has a slightly bigger office or a slightly more comfortable chair. We purchase TVs for a slightly clearer picture. In other words, we find immense, world-shattering connotations in the faintest little cosmetic changes and deviations, yet we struggle to appreciate the difference between heterosexual and homosexual couples, a difference that, if I must remind you, involves the creation of human life.

A man and a woman can get together and make a person. They can, between the two of them, conceive a human child. If I have to put this in terms that my fellow nostalgic Millennials will comprehend: a man and a woman can combine their powers, much like the Power Rangers, and create a brand-new thing. Maybe a better analogy would be Captain Planet, where all the Planeteers could combine forces and conjure a separate sentient being (though the being conjured by marriage usually isn’t a spandex-clad vigilante who goes around assaulting people for throwing aluminum cans into the wrong wastebasket).

The two relationships differ from each other. They are not equal. One is something, the other is something else. They are not the same.

PROCREATIVE IN PRINCIPLE

Yes, to answer the standard objection, it’s true that not all married heterosexual couples can have kids. It’s also true that, as we covered in the last chapter, quite a number of them choose not to have kids. But does that render moot the principle that marriage is by definition procreative?

Well, let’s look at it this way: Is it accurate to say, in principle, that human beings have legs?

If so, what about a person born legless or a person who loses her legs in a tragic accident later in life?

Is she now subhuman?

Does she belong to some other species?

What about lazy couch potatoes who choose not to use their legs, electing instead to sit on the couch and watch Top Chef reruns?

Do any of these examples falsify my “human beings have legs” statement?

Or do they simply reflect the fact that humans have free will and that the human body is prone to disease and dysfunction?

Some heterosexual couples can’t conceive children. This happens by disability, mutation, defect, or some other physical misfortune, but we most often call it a defect precisely because we recognize that there is a procreative potential these individuals should share but do not, through no fault of their own.

These people can’t have kids incidentally, whereas two men or two women can’t have kids by the very nature of their union. One is an accident of nature—an aberration—while the other is a result of nature.

THERE IS ONLY ONE TYPE OF FAMILY

What about gay couples adopting children? Surely adoption means that gay couples can still fulfill the purpose and nature of marriage.

Well, even if it were true that gay adoption is healthy for children, it would not make gay marriage legitimate. You can’t any more make a walrus into a human by stitching human legs onto his hide than you can make a human nonhuman by removing his legs.

Regardless, the most exhaustive studies have categorically proven that same-sex parenting is not equal to heterosexual parenting, and that children of gay couples are more likely to grow up with emotional difficulties.

This is not surprising. The psychological benefits of having a dad and a mom in the home are clear and incontrovertible. Forty years of research into the subject demonstrates the inescapable and self-evident reality that children need fathers and mothers.

The book Marriage on Trial by Glenn T. Stanton and Dr. Bill Maier reports that babies can tell the difference between a male and a female by eight weeks of age:

This diversity in itself provides children with a broader, richer experience of contrasting relational interactions….Whether they realize it or not, by sheer experience children are learning at the earliest age that men and women are different and have different ways of dealing with most aspects of life.

It’s obvious that mothers and fathers bring something different and diverse to the table. This is not just an assumption but an indisputable scientific fact, backed by years of research and millennia of human experience. Indeed, over 350 studies from over a dozen nations confirm the importance of a household with both parents present.

When looking at any indicator, from general happiness to professional success to educational achievement, the essential need for a child to have the input of a mother and a father is demonstrable and unmistakable.

A child has a right to a mom and a dad. If she cannot have that because her parents are dead or otherwise out of the picture, and she is waiting to be adopted, then the next best option is for her to be taken in by a new family where the father role can be filled by a man and the mother role by a woman. What is natural and intended should be re-created, not subverted or replaced by something disordered and disorienting.

Of course, some children don’t have both parents because they live in single-parent homes. Whether by death or divorce or abandonment, they are left with just their mother or their father. These children are not doomed, obviously, and their lives can still be extremely happy and fulfilling, but nobody would call this an ideal scenario.

The point is, no matter what, all kids—everyone, all people, everywhere, forever—have an innate longing to be connected with and raised by both a male and female parental figure. Preferably, these figures would be their biological progenitors. But if this cannot be the case, then ideally they’d have another male and female to fill that void.

The confusion sets in when a child does not have, say, his father around, and then another female separate from his mother comes in to take up that position. The kid will still long for that male influence, and the more that it isn’t fulfilled by his mom’s female lover, the more bewildered and disturbed and guilty he will likely feel. At least if he had a single mom, nobody would tell him that he shouldn’t desire a male role model. But the children of gay couples are told every day, whether explicitly or implicitly, that they should be perfectly happy with two moms or two dads.

Gay couples, on the other hand, do not have a right to be parents, because kids are not property or fashion statements. Kids have rights. And among them is the right to not be tossed into the middle of a social experiment that tinkers with the most fundamental characteristics of the family. They have a right to a stable home life. It may be true that heterosexual unions often end in divorce these days, but the answer is to strengthen those unions, not abandon them. Besides, whatever the divorce rates say, the fact is that gay couples, particularly men, are very often not monogamous. Although infidelity occurs among straight couples, among gay couples it is part of the lifestyle.

Studies out of San Francisco State University and Alliant International University concluded that approximately 50 percent of male homosexual relationships are “open,” meaning the partners are allowed to have other partners on the side. In half of all gay relationships, there is not, apparently, even an attempt at fidelity.

A study by the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service, published in 2003, found that the average gay relationship lasts less than two years. Other research has found that over 80 percent of gay men have had over fifty sexual partners in their lifetime, with close to 30 percent estimating that they’ve been with more than a thousand. A thousand, for God’s sake.

Throw in the fact that gays have much higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, and disease, and you begin to see that perhaps this is a catastrophic environment in which to raise a family.

Children require constancy and stability. They need to feel that they have a solid foundation under their feet. To throw them into a world characterized by temporary flings and polyamorous love triangles is to deprive them of the safety and security they deserve and desire. Admittedly, many children raised by heterosexual couples are not given this kind of stability either, but the gay community has all of these flaws on steroids. And the one thing a gay couple can, in principle, never provide, and the one thing all children need more than anything else, is the love and attention of a devoted mother and father, each playing a role and serving a purpose the other cannot.

THE HOMOSEXUAL CHOICE

Another argument raised by progressives is that homosexuality is innate—not a choice or a decision—which proves that it is natural, which proves, allegedly, that gay marriage is itself natural. I’ll briefly address this argument because it is common, not because it’s compelling. Obviously, even if homosexuals were “born with it,” that doesn’t say anything about the nature of marriage. Just because you are born with a desire for something does not mean you should have it or can have it. I was born with a desire to fly, but that doesn’t mean I can barge into the cockpit of a commercial aircraft and help myself to the captain’s chair. And suppose I do; I doubt my arguments about my innate desires would hold a lot of weight during the FBI investigation.

In any case, it isn’t quite true that gays are gay from birth. There are many factors that play into our sexual orientation. It isn’t written entirely into our genetic code—it develops over time, and it can change. Some of it has nothing to do with our choices; some of it does. The idea of someone being gay from birth brings to mind the somewhat questionable concept of homosexual babies lusting after other babies of the same sex. It should go without saying that there can’t really be any gay two-year-olds running around out there because children that age aren’t sexually attracted to anyone or anything. Their sexuality will manifest itself gradually as they grow older, which is a big part of that whole puberty thing.

Of course, this process is influenced by environment and culture and hormones and choice. For instance, a young boy exposed to graphic pornography from a young age will likely develop sexual urges that are different from one who isn’t (what precious few exist in that latter category). That doesn’t mean one will be gay and one won’t; it just means one will be different from the other. After all, this isn’t just a gay-versus-straight thing. As the bespectacled feminist sitting in a gender studies class right now might say, orientation isn’t “binary.”

These days we even have folks sexually aroused by inanimate objects and furry mascots and anime. Was that written into their genes from birth? Were they fated to that “lifestyle”? Was the anime enthusiast designed by God to find sexual fulfillment in cartoons? Or were these people exposed to images and activities that helped to develop and solidify those attractions—which they then made the decision to indulge in?

I’m not dogmatic about this, personally. Everyone seems to be looking for the easy answer, but I’m not. We are all inclined certain ways; we have certain urges—I’m not just talking sexually, but generally—and these impulses can be traced back to everything from our upbringing, to our hormones, to our culture, to our biology, to the media we consume, to, yes, our choices.

The proliferation of pornography does have the effect of, in essence, spreading perversion like herpes at a jam-band festival. We are so sexually overexposed and overstimulated from such a young age that we grow weary of healthy and natural sexuality years before we even become sexually active. Like drug addicts, we search for new highs. In that stale boredom, we delve into all kinds of filth and depravity, and as those seeds of perversion grow in our minds, we water them by finding “communities” of people online who share an enthusiasm for the same brand of debauchery. In my view, this is another reason why people “become gay.” Because there’s nothing else to do.

I was equal parts engrossed and repulsed recently when I read an interview online with a leading member and documentarian of the burgeoning “furry” community. For those who are not aware of this disturbed subset of the population, I will now, in order to illustrate my point, ruin your day by telling you about them. The furries are grown adults—mostly men and, according to the man in the interview, mostly gay—who dress up in animal costumes and attend conventions and gatherings where they connect with other costumed fetishists. They have sex, of course, and do other strange things, the details of which are best left to be conjured in the darkest recesses of the reader’s imagination.

What’s relevant about this troubled man’s story is that it started, of course, online, where he began watching porn as a child. Somehow or another, during one of his pubescent porn binges, he happened across a video or photographs of furry beings humping. He found that this intrigued his confused and overstimulated twelve-year-old self, and after a while, as he plunged deeper into this world of furry weirdos, he realized that there was a whole “community” of people who get their rocks off to the same thing. Now, being a furry is his identity, he says. It’s who he is. He considers himself even more a furry than he does a homosexual.

But are we to believe that this twisted infatuation with sexualized animal costumes was embedded into his genes from birth? Or is it possible that he developed the fetish as a child because it was different and strange and he was lost and bored, his mind hopelessly saturated in the filth of online pornography? Then, when he began to feel shame and disgust at these inclinations, he took comfort in the fact that many other people apparently indulge in the same bizarre fantasies. Thus, he was effectively “turned” into a furry, where if he’d been reading books or skipping stones down at the creek rather than masturbating to graphic pornography during his formative years, he may have grown into a perfectly normal, healthy, heterosexual adult.

Being gay is not exactly like being a furry, or being a member of whatever other fetish community, but I think the process often follows along the same lines. Certain urges are developed and sort of fertilized at a young age, and eventually a person finds not only sexual gratification in those urges, but identity.

So the big questions are: Are we defined by our urges or by our actions? Are we compelled to turn our desires into a “lifestyle,” or can we live beyond them? Do our proclivities automatically become a state of being?

I would say no, and so in that sense, it is a choice whether to be gay or to be straight. Our feelings may not be up to us, but how we live, what we do, whether we indulge those feelings—these decisions are ours to make.

Take the example of men who experience same-sex attraction but choose to resist it, control it, and even marry women and have kids. In today’s culture we are supposed to pretend these men don’t exist, or that they exist as traitors to “their people,” but I don’t see them that way. I see them as men who sometimes feel one way but choose to be another way.

Progressivism, on the other hand, insists that you are what you feel, and that what you feel is entirely out of your hands; you are a slave to your emotions and desires (but remember, not to your gender, because that’s the one negotiable here). This is another defining characteristic of their ideology; it turns you inward and tells you to never attempt to transcend your base urges.

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

So we know that “gay marriage” and “traditional marriage” are fundamentally distinct concepts, and we know that the distinction is deep and important; we know that there is no way to compensate for the differences; and we know that the gays are not fated to the lifestyle from birth (and even if they were, it would be irrelevant to the question). What is left, then? How can “gay marriage” and “traditional marriage” share the same title when they share nothing else and have no other similarities?

The standard response is “love.” Two men have a “right” to love each other, just the same as a man and a woman. But there are problems here: First, the love is not the same between the two respective couples. The love between a man and a woman gives birth to civilization. It creates life. It makes families. The love between a man and a woman is the bedrock. The foundation. The root that grounds our society and sustains it.

The love between men is not procreative. It does not conceive and bring forth life. It does not do anything, practically speaking. A fraternal love between men can be enriching in its own way, but a sexual relationship is, far from procreative and organic, destructive and unnatural. The sky-high rates of drug abuse, depression, disease, and suicide in the gay community ought to prove this point. Just as one example, a 2008 study published in the medical journal BMC Psychiatry found that the suicide rate is 200 percent higher for men who’ve been involved in sexual relationships with other men.

Second, as scandalous as this may seem to those who’ve ingested a steady diet of Nicholas Sparks novels and 1990s romantic comedies starring Meg Ryan, marriage is not just about love. Certainly, society’s rooting interest in your marriage has nothing to do with how you feel about your wife or your husband. Love is not hinged on how you feel, but on the choices you make. Love is itself a choice, as the old saying goes.

It’s revealing that our culture considers the emotional sensation of love to be the essence of marriage. This is why you end up with all of those divorces we talked about, and also why you end up with so many young men and women choosing cohabitation over marriage. If you love each other—that is, if you have nice feelings toward one another—there is no reason to get married, because you are already experiencing marriage, for all intents and purposes. Likewise, if you’re married and the emotions fade, you may as well move on. Marriage is supposed to feel good, and now that it doesn’t, it has no purpose. Time to cut your losses. The kids will understand.

But true marital love—the kind that society has a stake in, the kind that must be given a name, that must become its own institution—is more than emotional attachment or infatuation. Those are fleeting things. Marital love is committed, indissoluble, and procreative. Even if the feelings fade for a time, the love—that choice to remain loyal, to remain one, together for the sake of the other and the children—persists. If your relationship is not ordered toward family and commitment, there truly is no reason to stay in it if it should stop making you feel good. This, again, is what separates marriage from all other relationships, and it’s why only a man and a woman may enter into it.

Of course, the critic may say: OK, so the marriage between a man and a woman is different from the marriage between two men or two women, and the difference is quite essential. Fine. But should the government codify that difference by awarding the marriage title only to heterosexual couples? Why shouldn’t the government just stay out of it entirely?

Because the government doesn’t award marriage or give it away like a cash prize on Family Feud. All the government can do—and should do—is affirm the natural reality of the situation.

If marriage is anything, then it is an institution meant to bind a husband to his wife, a wife to her husband, and both mother and father to their children. If it is something at all, then it is that.

It is that or it is nothing. It is that or it is what people say it is now: just a temporary and soluble agreement between two people who feel some sort of mutual attraction. And if that’s all it is, then certainly the government shouldn’t acknowledge it or say anything about it one way or another.

Why do we need governments and courts to involve themselves in creating laws and tax codes for some provisional alliance between two (or three, or 189) adults (or an adult and a child, or an adult and a barnyard animal) who merely wish to live together (or apart, or whatever they want) and “love” each other?

You see, if gay marriage is even possible—if marriage can fundamentally be an institution that includes same-sex partnerships—then it is, by definition, not solid enough or essential enough to our civilization to warrant legal challenges and Supreme Court cases. If “gay marriage” is equal to “traditional marriage,” then they’re both utterly pointless, unimportant, and not deserving of recognition by the government or courts.

You want to love another person? Go. Go love them. Go love the whole world. Nothing was ever stopping you. There was never any law preventing it. If marriage is only a loving bond between two (or however many) lovers, why would anyone ask for it to be legalized? That’s not illegal, it never was, and it never could have been.

The very fact that we are having this conversation proves that everyone involved sees marriage as something greater than a contract between consenting, loving adults. And if it’s something more significant, then we are back to the old definition, which is the only definition that makes sense in the first place.

In the end, it turns out, you can’t argue for gay marriage without arguing against it.