Conjugal America

On the Public Purposes of Marriage

Allan C. Carlson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351526623
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The institution of marriage has become perilously weak in America. Changes in the law over the past three decades, such as the spread of no-fault divorce and broad acquiescence to cultures of divorce and intentional childlessness, have stripped traditional marriage of important legal supports. Half of all marriages end in divorce and just as many are childless. Conjugal America seeks to recapture the real purposes of marriage and the unchanging nature of this most vital and fundamental human institution.Confronting contemporary issues and drawing heavily on the natural and social sciences, each chapter also reaches into the past to find truths grounded in human experience. Carlson reexamines the basic bond of marriage to procreation, showing that this tie has been no less than the foundation of the unwritten sexual constitution of Western civilization. He also shows how the Gnostic heresy, which despises procreation, posed a stark danger to the early Christian movement and to ""the sexual constitution"" of our own time as well. He then dissects claims regarding the ""evolution of marriage,"" showing that true marriage always represents the vital connection of the sexual with the economic.Carlson explores the political nature of marriage showing, why every ambitious totalitarian government seeks above all to destroy marriage, and why the true marital bond actually stands for liberty. He concludes by arguing for the necessity of marriage policy. Because both the nature of the centralizing state and the pressures of modernity have altered family circumstances, new protections and encouragements to marriage are now imperative. Conjugal America will be central to the new debate on marriage and its purposes. This book sees the current moment as an opportunity to revitalize a necessary institution that has recently been abused and neglected and reinstate it as the primary source of commitment and care in the modern world.

1
Children as the First Purpose of Marriage

When Massachusetts officials, facing the court case Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, set out to defend that state’s marriage law from a challenge by seven homosexual couples, their major line of defense was procreation. Making babies, the state argued, was the first purpose of marriage. By definition, same-sex partners could not create a child as a couple. This was important, the argument continued, because children usually do best when growing up with their two natural parents. Moreover, requiring fertility tests before marriage by opposite sex couples would be cumbersome and overly intrusive. It was better to let all otherwise qualified opposite sex couples to marry than to go down that troubling regulatory path.

And the initial trial court, let us remember, agreed with the state. The judge ruled that the primary purpose of marriage, under Massachusetts law, was, in fact, procreation. Accordingly, the court concluded that the state could reasonably distinguish between homosexual claimants to marriage and those heterosexual couples that were at least “theoretically…capable” of procreation without relying on “inherently more cumbersome” non-coital reproductive methods.¹

Even Evan Wolfson, the acknowledged leader of the “gay marriage” movement, has agreed that

At first glance, the “basic biology” argument seems to make some sense. After all, it doesn’t take more than a fourth-grade health class education to know that men’s and women’s bodies in some sense “complement each other” and that when a man and a woman come “together as one flesh” it often leads to procreation.²

But of course, the trial court decision did not survive appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. This higher court, on a 4-3 vote, dismissed the procreation argument, pointing to opposite sex couples in which the woman was over childbearing age or that were otherwise infertile. Could the state “rationally” tell them that they could not marry? It could not. Indeed, the Court noted that, under state law, even those “who cannot stir from their death bed may marry,” provided they were of the opposite sex. Moreover, infertility was not a ground for divorce, and by inference so not a bar to marriage either. In addition, the Court noted that Massachusetts law protected the parental rights of homosexuals and allowed same-sex couples to adopt children. It was irrational for the state so to enable “gay parenting” while also denying the children involved the benefits of “family stability and economic security” found in a marital home.

Evan Wolfson also moves on to dissect the procreation argument, finding it actually “riddled with holes.” If procreation is the purpose of marriage, he argues, then the marriages of Bob and Elizabeth Dole, John and Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Pat and Shelley Buchanan should all be declared invalid. So should the marriage of the Father of our County, George Washington, to Martha, which produced no children. Another same-sex activist, Dale Carpenter, argues that if there was any merit to the procreation argument,

We would require prospective married couples to sign an affidavit stating that they are able to procreate and intend to procreate. If in, say, 10 years they had not procreated, we could presume they are unable or unwilling to do so and could dissolve the marriage as unworthy of the unique institution.

He adds that since no one has really proposed this, or anything like it, it is clear that the defenders of marriage “do not take the narrow procreationist view of marriage very seriously.” Instead, he says, the traditionalists impose another rule: “Nobody is required to procreate in order to marry, except gay couples.” Such discrimination, he implies, could not survive a test by the “equal protection clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment.³ Indeed, that usually faithful conservative Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, in his 2003 dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, noted:

If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is “no state interest” for purposes of proscribing [private adult sex], what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.⁴

It is fair to conclude, I think, that the procreation argument is in serious trouble.

My purpose here is to examine the bond between marriage and procreation. Where did this linkage come from? Why is it no longer self-evident? What earlier developments weakened the procreative nature of marriage? And: Is it possible to salvage this appeal to procreation in the same-sex marriage debate?

Sex and Civilization

Turning to the first question—where did the bond between marriage and procreation come from?—my answer is simple: It is no less than the foundation for what we might call the unwritten sexual constitution of our civilization.

Nearly two thousand years ago, what would become Western Christian civilization began to take form in a time of great sexual disorder. The moral and family disciplines of the old Roman Republic were gone, replaced by the intoxications of empire. Slave concubinage flourished in these years. Divorce by mutual consent was easy, and common. Adultery was chic, and widespread. Homosexuality was a frequent practice, particularly in man-boy sexual relations. There was a callous disregard for infant life, with infanticide a regular practice. Caesar Augustus, worried about the plummeting Roman birthrate, even implemented the so-called “Augustan Laws” in 18 BC, measures that punished adultery, penalized childlessness, and showered benefits on families with three or more children. These laws may have slowed, but did not reverse, the moral and social deterioration.

Between 50 and 300 AD, and out of this same chaos, the Fathers of the Christian Church crafted a new sexual order. Procreative marriage served as its foundation. Importantly, they also built this new order in reaction to the Gnostic heresies which threatened the young church; indeed, which threatened all human life.

The Gnostic idea rose independent of Christianity, but I am concerned here with so-called Christian Gnosticism. The Gnostics drew together myths from Persia, Jewish magic and mysticism, Greek philosophy, and Chaldean mystical speculation. More troubling, they also appealed to the freedom from the law as proclaimed by Christ and Paul. In this sense, they were antinomians; that is, they believed that the Gospel freed Christians from obedience to any law, be it scriptural, civil, or moral. The Gnostics claimed to have a special “gnosis,” a unique wisdom, a “secret knowledge” denied to ordinary Christians. They appealed to unseen spirits. They denied nature. They developed a mélange of moral and doctrinal ideas. But virtually all Gnostics did share two views: they rejected marriage as a child-related institution; and they scorned procreation.

This heresy posed a grave challenge to the early Christian movement. Indeed, the Epistles are replete with warnings against Gnostic teachings. In 1 Timothy 4, for example, Paul writes that “some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons….who forbid marriage.” In Jude 4 we read that admission into the Christian community “has been secretly gained by…ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness.” 2 Peter tells of false prophets corrupting the young church, “irrational animals, creatures of instinct.… reveling in their dissipation, carousing with you. They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable souls.” Similar warnings or admonitions are found in 1 Corinthians (5:1-8; 6:12-13), Romans (6:1; 8:2), Philippians (3:18), Galatians (5:13), 2 Timothy (3:6-7), Ephesians (5:5-7), and Revelation (2:14-15). Simon Magus, described in Acts, chapter 8, was most probably a Gnostic, evidenced by his use of magic.

Relative to sex, Gnosticism took two forms. One strand emphasized total sexual license, endless sexual experimentation. Claiming the freedom of the Gospel, these Gnostics indulged in adultery, homosexuality, and ritualistic fornication. The Church Father Clement described abuse of the Eucharist by the Gnostics in the church of Alexandria:

There are some who call Aphrodite Pandemos [physical love] a mystical communion….[T]hey have impiously called by the name of communion any common sexual intercourse…. These thrice-wretched men treat carnal and sexual intercourse as a sacred religious mystery, and think that it will bring them to the Kingdom of God.⁵

Other Gnostics of this sort taught that “marrying and bearing [children] are from Satan”; that sexual intercourse by “spiritual men,” in and of itself, would hasten the coming of the Pleroma, or the fullness of the divine hierarchy of the eons; and that the true believer should have every possible sexual experience.

In marked contrast to this polymorphous perversity, the other Gnostic strand totally rejected sexuality. Tatian, for example, led a faction called the Encratites, or “the self-controlled.” They saw marriage as corruption and fornication, and demanded lifelong abstinence. In the non-canonical Gospel According to the Egyptians, Salome asks: “How long shall men die?” Jesus is said to answer: “As long as you women bear children.” From this, these Gnostics concluded that they could defeat death by ceasing procreation. They also celebrated androgyny, since a being without sexual identity could obviously not be procreative. The non-canonical Gospel of Thomas has Jesus saying: “Every woman who makes herself male enters the Kingdom of Heaven.” The evil of the world denied the bearing of children; the celibate alone would enjoy the Kingdom of God.

Considering these two Gnostic forms, historian John Noonan summarizes:

The whole thrust of the antinomian [Gnostic] current was to devalue marriage, to deprive marital relations of any particular purpose, and to value sexual intercourse as experience [alone].⁶

Within the broad context of a Roman civilization sliding into family breakdown and sexual hedonism, the young Christian church faced as well this infiltration of life-denying, socially destructive ideas into its own ranks. For Christian leaders, the great question became: Just what is marriage for?

Christian Marriage

Answers came from several sources. The Church Fathers noted, for example, the fierce hatred shown by the Gnostics for the Hebrew Scriptures. From Judaism, accordingly, the Church Fathers could see children as a Divine blessing for their parents and for the community as a whole. As told in Deuteronomy:

And because you hearken to these ordinances, and keep and do them, the Lord your God will keep with you the covenant and the steadfast love which he swore to your fathers to keep; he will love you, bless you, and multiply you; he will also bless the fruit of your body…. You shall be blessed above all peoples; there shall not be male or female barren among you….⁷

Genesis was also filled with promises from God to the patriarchs that their wives should be fruitful and that the Lord “will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is upon the seashore.”⁸ Throughout the centuries, the Jewish sages had declared that “One without children is considered as though dead.” Another early source stated that “he who does not engage in procreation is as if he diminished the Divine image.”⁹

Another Jewish inspiration may have been the small, ascetic Essene community, now famed for compiling the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to the first-century AD historian Josephus, members of this order entered marriages “not for self-indulgence, but for the procreation of children.”¹⁰

Still another source may have been Philo, a Jew trained in Greek philosophy, who expressed revulsion over pagan Roman pleasure-seeking. “Like a bad husbandman,” he wrote, “[the homosexual] spends his labor night and day on soil from which no growth at all can be expected.” The sexual act was for procreation, Philo insisted. Seeking a consistent sexual standard, he even reached a novel conclusion, condemning marriage to women known to be sterile.¹¹

Another source for early Christian leaders was the Stoic ideal. Also filled with revulsion over the sexual excesses of first-century Rome, the Stoics—including philosophers such as Epictetus and Musonius Rufus—summoned reason to control human desires and behavior. Moderation in all things, including sexuality, was their goal. They also held that there was a natural law which gave purpose to human life and which revealed acts unworthy of human beings. Sexual intercourse in marriage, the Stoics concluded, found its clear and natural purpose in the propagation of the human race. However, intercourse only for pleasure was suspect. As the first-century Stoic, Seneca, declared,

All love of another’s wife is shameful; so too, too much love of your own. A wise man ought to love his wife with judgment, not affection. Let him control his impulses and not be borne headlong into copulation. Nothing is fouler than to love a wife like an adulteress…. Let them show themselves to their ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Children as the First Purpose of Marriage
• 2. Two Becoming One Flesh: Marriage as the Union of the Sexual and the Economic
• 3. “Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace”: The Communal Nature of Marriage
• 4. Standing for Liberty: Marriage, Virtue, and the Political State
• 5. “Conjugal Happiness” and the American Style: The Special Relationship between Marriage and the American Experience
• 6. The Necessity of Marriage Policy
• Appendix
• Index