OPINION:
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. makes several important points (“A marriage proposal,” Opinion, June 17) but arrives at a destructive conclusion: We should privatize marriage and let the state merely enforce contracts.
While the threat to religious liberty that Mr. Tyrrell discusses is an important reason to be troubled by same-sex “marriage,” it is not the only (or even the principal) reason for concern. To suggest that we privatize marriage is to ignore the significant public purposes that have been served for millennia by this most fundamental social institution.
Marriage is neither a purely religious institution nor merely a civic one. It is a natural institution, rooted in the order of nature itself. Marriage has always been a male-female union because it is that union that reproduces the human race. This is a public interest, which is optimized when the man and woman remain together to raise the children they produce.
To appease churches by promising to protect a right that already is guaranteed to them by the First Amendment is no compromise, and to deny the public interest in the reproduction of the human race is sheer foolishness. The only “peaceful solution” is for homosexual activists to admit the obvious: that their relationships, whatever other merits the partners may claim for them, are fundamentally different from heterosexual ones because they never result in natural reproduction. Therefore, they should cease their assault upon marriage.
PETER SPRIGG
Senior fellow for policy studies
Family Research Council
Washington
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