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When a happy young couple says “I do,” their marriage is contingent on their performing a specific sexual act.
If they want to make their marriage real, they must consummate it. And that means that the meaning of marriage lies in the possibility of procreation. A marriage unconsummated is not a marriage. It is nullified, as though the ceremony had never happened.
To become real, a marriage requires the possibility of conception. It does not require conception. Failure to conceive has never been grounds for nullification. Older, presumably infertile, couples are allowed to marry because if they had performed the same act in the past they might have conceived a child.
From its inception, the institution of marriage has always granted male/female couples the presumption of fertility. A couple that can never, between themselves, perform the generative sexual act cannot be married, regardless of what the state and the courts say.
Moreover, marriage has always been a universal human institution. If Jack and Jane are married in Paducah or in Xian they will be commonly recognized as such anywhere in the world. You cannot say the same of Jack and Jim, regardless of whether they were married in Boston or Buenos Aires. If Jack and Jim travel the world and present themselves as a married couple, most people will be sufficiently polite not to challenge them. But they will look askance at Jack and Jim.
For their marriage to be real, a couple must perform a specific action. Similarly, if you attend a funeral where all of the ceremonial requirements have been fulfilled… except that no one has died, you have not attended a funeral. And you cannot have dinner if you sit at a table and go through the motions of eating, when there is no food or drink on the table.
Same-sex marriage is a fiction.
Even if everyone believes that the fiction is real.
What is a funeral when no one died? It is theatre. What is a dinner where you go through the motions of eating without there being any food? It is pantomime.
Same-sex marriage is a fiction. Even if everyone believes that the fiction is real-- or be too afraid to say otherwise-- that does not make it less of a fiction. The world does not become flat just because everyone says it is. In many ways the strangest part of the current debate over same-sex marriage is how little of it involves rational argument.
Proponents of same-sex marriage declare that if infertile couples are allowed to marry, then fertility cannot be a basis for marriage.
Grant that they do not understand the difference between possible and impossible. More importantly, it is nonsense to say that same-sex couplings are infertile.
If two people, between themselves, cannot perform any action that might lead to conception, they are both might be perfectly fertile. Since they cannot perform an action that would actualize their reproductive potential and resolve the issue of their fertility, we cannot say that they are either fertile or infertile. If Jack and Jill or Jack and Jim shake hands, and if no conception results, we would not say that this makes them sterile.
Others have argued that without same-sex marriage then gay couples cannot fall in love or live their love. Does anyone really believe that, given the absence of institutionalized same-sex marriage, gays have never fallen in love? And since when did marriage become the way to find romantic love?
Throughout most of human history romantic love and marriage have existed in separate domains. The Western tradition of romantic love begins with courtly love, which was, by definition, adulterous. Only a miniscule percentage of all human marriages have even pretended to be expressions of romantic love.
More often than not people have considered marriage to be the graveyard of romantic love.
Anyone who might be inclined to tell the truth
will be forced to shut up.
What happens if Jack and Jim are declared by the state to be married? At the least, everyone will be required to play along, for fear of hurting their feelings. Anyone who might be inclined to tell the truth will be forced to shut up.
It’s like the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As Hans Christian Andersen told it, a couple of unscrupulous tailors convinced the Emperor that they have bedecked him in the most exquisite finery, but that it would only be visible to his most worthy subjects.
Of course, his subjects knew that he was not wearing anything, and was being played for a fool. Or else they were simply afraid of being punished.
Only one boy was sufficiently naïve to blurt out what everyone knew: “He isn‘t wearing anything at all.” If same-sex marriage becomes the law, you do not want to be that little boy. You will instantly be denounced as a bigoted hate-monger.
Most people know that same-sex couples are not really married. Some of them are too polite to say so. Others are being cowed into going along.
After all, it’s just a harmless illusion, so why not just go along?
Not to be too dramatic, but what happens to us when we are forced to accept that reality is what we say it is? What happens to us when we believe that we can change reality by controlling what people say and how they think?
All of a sudden, this does not feel quite so harmless.
