Here’s an excerpt from Bill Muehlenberg’s review of the new book “What Is Marriage?”:
[Those with the revisionist and radical view of marriage jettison] the fundamental core of marriage, the male-female relationship, and the openness to procreation, and renders it just a relationship based on feelings. Thus it completely misses the historical reason for marriage:
“Marriages have always been the main and most effective means of rearing healthy, happy, and well-integrated children. The health and order of society depend on the rearing of healthy, happy, and well-integrated children. That is why law, though it may take no notice of ordinary relationships, should recognize and support marriage. There can thus be no right for nonmarital relationships to be recognized as marriages.”
It is because human sexuality is always about the possibility of procreation, and thus the raising and rearing of the next generation, that governments have taken a keen interest in marriage, and granted it special benefits which other sorts of relationships do not receive.
“The revisionist view severs this important link. If marriage is centrally an emotional union, rather than one inherently ordered to family life, it becomes much harder to show why the state should concern itself with marriage any more than with friendship. Why involve the state in what amounts to the legal regulation of tenderness? The revisionist proposes a policy that she cannot give reasons for enacting.”
