In just a few weeks the Supreme Court will announce the last of its decisions for this term. It is almost certain that the Court will wait until the term’s very last day to announce its decision in the two “gay marriage” cases. It is now customary for the Court to save the most significant — and therefore, most controversial — cases until the very last day. Since the Court adjourns for the summer, the end of June has become the most important time of year for lawyers, litigants, and court watchers of all stripes.

The two cases come from opposite coasts. The first challenges an amendment to California’s state constitution that defines marriage as a man-woman relationship. This case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, is known as the “Proposition 8” case after the ballot initiative that enacted the amendment. The second, United States v. Windsor, was filed by a New York woman who was charged hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate taxes when she inherited from her longtime partner. Under the “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA), federal law does not recognize same-sex pairs as marriages.

These cases have split the nation asunder. For years, it was political suicide for a national politician to call for the recognition of same-sex relationships as marriage. The starkest example of this is President Obama, who endorsed gay marriage while rising through the ranks of the Chicago machine, only to emphatically declare that “marriage is between a man and a woman.” The president did, to his credit, “evolve” back to his old position before the 2012 elections, albeit under considerable pressure from donors.

In the span of a decade, it went from taboo to fashionable to support “marriage equality,” and the language of civil rights was appropriated for the cause. Senators and other national figures, mostly Democrats, came out of the woodwork to announce their support. In 2012, the Democrat National Committee became the first major party in the United States to include the issue as part of its platform. Some Republicans, mostly the usual suspects, adopted this latest fashion (though they lagged well behind Dick Cheney in this regard).

Christians were not immune from the preference cascade. Some liberal denominations had supported such measures for years — if that’s a badge of pride for you as a Christian, consider yourself acknowledged as ahead of the times. But the pressure was immense even on traditionalists. At best, Christians were accused of naively clinging to an outmoded morality and trying to force it on the rest of the nation. At worst, traditional marriage defenders were compared to white supremacists and jeered at for denying equal citizenship.

Christians have been equally unhelpful, accusing well-meaning revisionists of attempting to destroy civilization, or speaking of a sinister gay agenda. The narrative of equal rights and love-is-love puts traditionalists on the defensive, oftentimes scrambling for a rhetorical bomb to lob back in retaliation. Whatever truth there may be in such claims, it is hardly necessary to take such a tone in every conversation.

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The Constitution guarantees “the equal protection of the laws.” According to revisionists, this means that states cannot treat heterosexuals and homosexuals differently. On this argument, prohibiting homosexuals from getting married is like forbidding a black man from marrying a white woman — which was the case with the Jim Crow era’s anti-miscegenation laws. Perry v. Hollingsworth, the California case, has been incessantly compared to the famous Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court ruled that anti-miscegenation statutes were unconstitutional. (Some learned responses to this comparison can be found here and here.)

This is strong rhetoric, one that Christians (and other traditionalists) cannot simply ignore or dismiss. The charge is especially difficult when our formula for what makes a marriage seems to have collapsed into “love + consent” (more on that shortly).

Equal protection is understood as requiring states to treat like situations alike. Thus, if “love + consent” are the only requirements for a marriage, then it is arbitrary discrimination to exclude some from participating solely on the basis of their chosen partner’s gender. That view of marriage brings with it a lot of other problems, not least of which is that it has trouble accounting for other relationships most wouldn’t recognize.

But the biggest problem is that it totally fails to explain marriage policy. Marriage law does discriminate — it chooses some relationships and ignores others. Romantic gay pairs are just one of dozens of relationships with which marriage law does not concern itself. But this is question-begging. After all, the thing we want to know is, what makes a marriage?

Answering that question is no small task. Discussing marriage policy is like trying to untangle a bundle of nerves without touching more than one at a time.

This Is Not About Gay Marriage.

Too often, the term “gay marriage” lands on the table with a thud and Christians seize on the “gay” part. Let’s be very clear: our sexual mores are not a basis for public policy.

Missing this point wastes so much time. Very few people suggest prohibiting homosexual relationships or homosexual behavior. Regardless of your position on the wisdom of such attempts, the ship sailed on that long ago. Whether it is worth your time to advocate for such policies is your decision to make, but it is not a conversation that the public is having, and it is not the issue in any of the marriage policy debates.

That’s not to say that homosexual sex is irrelevant to the debate — far from it! For some, homosexual sex isn’t really sex at all, but rather, a harmful and cheap facsimile that cannot consummate marriage. For others, it is a different mode of expressing “pair-bonding” intimacy and adds to the case for allowing same-sex marriage. However, talking about the physical act alone tells us little about marriage policy. Failing to connect it to the debate risks the credibility of the speaker.

This applies whether you are a traditionalist observing that same-sex partners don’t fit together in certain ways, or a revisionist ascribing opposition to a simple “ick” factor. These observations are a premise, not a conclusion. You still need to make an argument.

What Is Marriage?

It is impossible to discuss marriage policy without a robust conception of what marriage actually is. My experience is that skipping this question leads to endless misunderstanding. Starting here will still lead to deep, visceral disagreement, but will at least keep us from lobbing Jesus and Macklemore quote grenades back and forth.

The Book of Common Prayer describes marriage with characteristic beauty:

“…an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men: and therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.”

The sublimity of that passage is inspiring, but it is not a reason to make the law a certain way. For starters, a lot of people disagree with it. Religious arguments are not sufficient to create public policy. The Bible is a true book and its teachings bind the conscience, but it does not follow that all of its strictures are matters for public regulation. Law is the authority by which matters of public concern are regulated. Thus, the discussion needs to start there.

Nor can history or (secular) tradition determine the outcome. These things can and should guide us, but they cannot rule the living. For starters, most of us are ill-equipped to discuss the history of marriage. Sure, Blackstone talked about marriage channeling babymaking urges. But did you know that the Romans had two different kinds of marriage, one of which the church tried to appropriate and strengthen? John Locke thought that once upbringing and inheritance were settled, spouses should be able to divorce at will.

Christian orthodoxy may not logically compel any particular view of marriage as a metaphysical reality, and in fact, it is not wholly ridiculous to hold that marriage really is mostly a social institution. I think that view is wrong, Biblically and philosophically, but the important thing is to make the definition part of the conversation.

What features must a relationship have to warrant public recognition? There are two answers vying for supremacy. Judge Walker, the federal district court judge who blocked California’s Proposition 8, defined marriage this way:

Marriage is the state recognition and approval of a couple’s choice to live with each other, to remain committed to one another, and to form a household based on their own feelings about one another, and their agreement to join in an economic partnership and support one another in terms of the material needs of life.

This is what I referred to above as the “love + consent” view. If this view is right, then it really is arbitrary discrimination to exclude some from participating solely on the basis of their chosen partner’s gender. On this view, marriage law is about affirming individuals in their life choices and promoting a general stability between consenting adult relationships.

Sherif Girgis, et al., define marriage this way:

Marriage is the union of a man and a woman who make a permanent and exclusive commitment to each other of the type that is naturally (inherently) fulfilled by bearing and rearing children together.

They call this the “conjugal” view because it is based on the uniquely conjugal nature of man-woman pairs. On this view, marriage’s public purpose is to channel the natural impulses of human beings that lead to children, and to ensure that children are raised by their biological parents to the extent possible. You can also call this the “procreative” or “child-centric” view.

Judge Walker’s skepticism might be excused. Even if marriage really is as the second definition describes (as I believe it must be), most of us stopped treating it that way a long time ago. Even many orthodox, conservative Christians talk about marriage as if it were primarily the recognition of an emotional connection. Put simply, our neglect of marriage started long before DOMA. No-fault divorce is the most commonly identified villain, a development that took over forty years to overcome the cultural capital that protected the institution of marriage.

Is marriage really about procreation? The answer is “yes.” Metaphysically, there is always this particular relationship that one can deduce from human nature and biology. But the answer is also “no.” Sociologically, we’ve been incoherent on this for decades, maybe longer. It looks mighty suspicious for us to treat our own marriages like an official registry of long-term special-friends with benefits, then turn around and say that’s not really what it is. A common refrain from libertarians or conflict-avoiders is the call to get government out of the marriage business altogether. Maybe that would be best, but first it requires us to adopt a very specific view of marriage.

Is marriage a purely private institution, or is it essentially public? As Christian marriage practice is to our shame, so too is our slippery grasp of marriage as a public good. If you want to see just how much we’ve lost, ask a typical traditionalist why elderly people are allowed to marry if marriage is about procreation. There are effective responses of varying quality to this facile objection, but it’s likely that you won’t get one. Pro tip: If the modern mind can’t reconcile a rather obvious example with millennia of social practice, chances are the problem is with the modern mind. This is not an argument from tradition, but a warning about easily surrendering to the zeitgeist.

Thousands of pages have been spilled on the question of the essence of marriage. Here, it will have to suffice to insist that we begin with the question, “What must something be to count as a marriage?” A full treatment of this discussion is far too much for this short article. For more, I highly recommend starting with this book (the source of many of my terms and arguments), but for those so inclined, an excellent place to canvass the serious arguments is to follow the conversation found here. Starting the conversation here, however, will avoid confusion and discord and may even help save some relationships from the strife of misunderstanding.

Exercise Charity in All Things

Most of us have a working knowledge of this principle on a personal level. It’s a little trickier on the policy level. We’re still Christians, even when talking about gay marriage. Charity in all things means that we don’t regard as irrelevant the emotional pain or anger of others — even while we are careful not to let these emotions serve as trumps.

Proponents of redefining marriage invoke a number of emotional scenes in support of their argument. For example, a man lies dying in the hospital while his longterm partner waits outside, prevented from seeing his love because of outmoded marriage laws. Or a woman dies and her estate passes to a son she hasn’t spoken to in years because the state does not recognize her partner of 30 years who changed her diapers in old age. Sure, a person can name a next of kin or write a will, but why should they have to do that? What is different about heterosexual couples that makes them uniquely eligible for these conveniences?

We should acknowledge that there are many things that marriage is tied to that have no necessary connection to marriage. These situations are not unique to gay couples. They apply to the bachelor brothers who never stopped living together, or to the daughter who cared for her mother in her last days. It is wrong to trivialize a problem because we don’t like the solutions on offer.

Charity also requires acknowledging the “fact of equality.” As a matter of metaphysical truth, or at the very least of political convention, everyone in society is entitled to equal say. No perspective is inherently superior to any other. I don’t mean that truth is relative or subjective. Rather, I mean that the equal human dignity of all people in a democracy requires that everyone be treated with formal equality.

There’s an easy way to live this out. Start by articulating the other side’s position. Preferably right now, before it comes up with some guy at the gym or a coworker. What values and principles do the other side hold and how does your position brush up against them? A lot of the rhetorical appeal for gay marriage comes from the basic emotional needs of all humans for acceptance, friendship, and public equality. Many advocates for gay marriage earnestly believe that this denial is simply part of a systemic pattern of mistreatment of gays and lesbians. It simply will not do to ignore or trivialize these feelings.

Equal dignity has a political implication, too. No person’s interests in society are less important because he has a different idea of how that society should look. The fact of equality does not translate automatically to any other conclusions. But it must be acknowledged at the outset that public policy choices do not privilege any individual’s perspective over another’s.

Christians take heed: Loving our neighbors may lead us to conclude that their view is wrong but we may never simply assume their voice is irrelevant.

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The American people, including Christians, have spurned the idea of marriage as an other-focused institution in which the spouses’ personal satisfaction and fulfillment is at best a collateral concern. Gay marriage only calls us all out on this. It forces us to confront the questions of what marriage is and why it is a public concern at all.

I have to admit that the fact that many people have trouble answering questions about definition and purpose concerns me a little. Without an answer, why do you think the state is involved in marriage law? Backed into this rhetorical corner, we’ve seen far too much hate and ill-will, both overt and hidden. We must examine our hearts to ensure our opposition is not rooted in reflexive disdain.

This is a hard needle to thread. The debate is about marriage, not gays. But we must not discount the experiences and emotions of our same-sex attracted friends, neighbors, siblings, and selves. I, for one, cannot even approximate this task without the grace of Jesus Christ.

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So what happens now?

Regarding The Law

My prediction is that the Court will strike down DOMA, but that no one rationale will capture a majority. The Court’s four liberals will almost certainly accept the more expansive challenge (more on that below). Some of the conservatives might buy the federalism challenge and vote to invalidate the law on those grounds. My instinct is that the Chief Justice and Justice Kennedy are most susceptible to this argument, with Justice Alito as an outside shot. I predict that Justices Scalia and Thomas, the Court’s most ardent conservatives, will vote to uphold DOMA.

Observers on both sides think it is likely that the Court will avoid the crux of the Proposition 8 case with a technical dodge, probably by holding that the defenders of the law lack standing to litigate.

Meanwhile, a cursory understanding of basic constitutional civics forces us to the face the incongruence of waiting for nine lawyers in Washington to decide how the rest of us will structure society. Roe v. Wade perfected a similar coup d’siège, and led to a backlash so severe it has caused pro-abortion forces to question its usefulness. And here we are, after 40 years of march and counter-march, countless genuinely stupid comments about women and their bodies, and 50 million dead babies. One can almost hope the Court is tepid about returning to the heady days.

Regarding The Harm

Publicly redefining marriage hurts the institution itself, and thereby society, children, and communities. How? The sociological answer is that changing marriage’s public definition weakens its norms. Permanence and exclusivity make sense when marriage is oriented to childbearing and family life; they make considerably less sense when marriage is about self-fulfillment or adult satisfaction. It should not surprise us, therefore, that those subcultures that have adopted this view of marriage have higher rates of adultery and divorce.

It’s a bit inconsistent for revisionists to insist that the law must publicly endorse homosexual lifestyles while insisting that the law’s definition of marriage is irrelevant to private behavior. If the law is a teacher or exemplar, it ought to try to get things right on all fronts. The law must recognize everyone as publicly equal, and to the extent marriage policy has led other parts of the law to fail in this, the law should be revised. But no one is served by the law promulgating the arbitrary view that marriage is any consensual romantic relationship between two people. If it’s going to be picking one kind of relationship out of many others, there must be a rational basis for it. That basis is the procreative tendency of man-woman pairs.

The “love + consent” view of marriage confuses other kinds of relationships. Take friendship, for example. The romantic cliché about “marrying my best friend” is an example of this. For years, I thought of relationships as essentially running along a spectrum, all of the same kind, organized by intimacy. But marriage is different in kind, not in degree. Understanding this is immensely liberating. I am free to enjoy intimacy of a different sort with my friends, my siblings, my colleagues, without feeling as if I am somehow betraying my wife. Marriage is probably the most important relationship we have, but it does not follow that it is therefore the most intense or that an ideal marriage is superior to other relationships in every aspect.

On the other side of the coin, properly understanding marriage also frees traditionalists to see the value in gay relationships. Affection, devotion, and commitment are good things, and there is no reason to disparage them. This doesn’t require approving homosexual sex, and it doesn’t change the fact that same-sex pairs aren’t the configuration we call “marriage” any more than a limited liability partnership or chess partners are. Unless, of course, “love + consent” are all that are required — so you see why it is important to start there. But there is much to commend in a lifelong partnership between two men or two women. Disentangling romantic emotion, sexual behavior, and public purpose allows us to celebrate one human’s dedication to another without approving every last part of it or collapsing all relationships into a single spectrum.

The more social justice-oriented among us should ask, “Who does a weakened marriage culture hurt?” It’s no secret that the disintegration of the black family has accompanied inner-city decay, a trend that is only so stark because of the disproportionate representation of blacks among the lower socioeconomic classes. No-fault divorce was supposed to liberate women; instead it has consigned them to raising children without fathers. We should be wary of social sciences, especially when marshaled in support of haute couture social causes, but we should not ignore the manifest differences present in differing relationship types.

Weak marriage culture means weak families, and weak families hurts the poorest among us. Wealthy (like Edie Winsdor) or powerful (like the lobby that convinced the president to re-de-evolve) gays will continue to participate in the kinds of narcissistic marriages that are ascendant in the higher classes, whether with men or women. I doubt they will be better or worse off than their straight-married friends. It will be in the housing projects and decaying rural villages that the effects are most harshly felt.

There is also an all-out war raging for the social science concerning children of gay couples. There were 50-some studies before the Supreme Court’s recent cases purporting to show no statistically significant harm to such children. These studies were deficient in some pretty obvious ways (snowballing subjects, small sample sizes, comparison to single parent homes, etc.). A more recent study that showed there were some troubling differences earned its author an ethics violation.

What’s sometimes lost in all this is that most people know, and studies support, that children do best with their biological mother and father. While this ideal is often unattainable, our law must do everything it can to encourage it. When men and women get together, they make babies whether they want them or not. It’s hardly unreasonable to support an institution that pressures mom and dad to take responsibility for the human life they’ve created.

Gay couples have children too. A single woman adopts a child. A divorced man moves his children in with his new boyfriend and girlfriend. These are all situations in which a child is deprived of either his mother or his father. Perhaps there should be other laws or institutions — next of kin laws, revision of intestacy laws — that address these situations, but marriage law makes no sense here.

Finally, gay marriage creates new bigotries. One of the lawyers for Prop 8’s challengers, a big shot named David Boies, told Charlie Rose, “When we win, we’ll have eliminated the last bastion of official discrimination.” Except for those who don’t identify neatly as gay or straight, those who choose to maintain more than one long-term relationship, people who marry inanimate objects, and so on. Leftists in France oppose gay marriage for some of these very reasons.

Regarding Christians and Our Neighbors

The new orthodoxy is already taking root. Already, private business owners are facing legal action for refusing to participate in gay wedding ceremonies. Ministers in other Western nations face punishment for preaching their religion’s stance on homosexuality.

If the Supreme Court forces a new and confusing view of marriage on the entire nation, this trend will only continue. Recall that proponents of redefinition are already comparing traditionalists to white supremacists. Whatever we think about free speech, most of us aren’t troubled by the ostracization and marginalization of racism — indeed, we regard it as a good thing. A person’s life and career are in jeopardy if he associates with neo-Nazi groups in his spare time, and I don’t know anyone who has a problem with that. What is in store for those who stubbornly continue to believe that there is something unique and identifying about man-woman pair bonds?

Of course, a political community may choose to create an institution that registers the consensual partnership of any two unrelated adults. But Christians cannot abandon Jesus’ teachings on marriage. So the culture will divide even further, with some — probably most — embracing the “love + consent” view of marriage, probably with permutations beyond non-conjugal pairs. Meanwhile, it will be increasingly difficult to understand and achieve the ideals of real marriage, something that it is impossible to imagine bothers revisionists. Marriage is already weakened almost to uselessness outside of certain narrow demographics. Weakening it further will make it a pointless label.

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We’re told that this is an inevitability, that traditionalists are on the wrong side of history. It’s no surprise that historicist notions like this creep into the debate (though it is a little troubling when we hear it from self-proclaimed Christians). Edie Winsdor told reporters, “If it doesn’t happen this time, it will happen next time or the next. But it will happen.”

Ms. Windsor should know better, since she was around back when gays weren’t especially interested in joining the bourgeois institution of marriage — they rather hoped to smash it to bits. This was before activists started accusing traditionalists of fabricating the connection of marriage and procreation (a conspiracy, one gathers, that runs back to Aristotle and in which William Blackstone was complicit).

But take heart: Jesus has overcome the world, and even history has a God. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of French citizens, led by three prominent leftists, march in the streets against gay marriage. A majority of U.S. states have provisions codifying traditional marriage — just recently, a bill died in the Illinois legislature that would have led to redefinition.

People change cultures and nothing is inevitable. It starts with our own marriages, and what we teach our kids. When we say marriage completes us, is that rank sentimentalism about our own psyches, or do we mean that we can now properly achieve what we could not before — biological procreation and family life? It starts with pastors connecting the Sacred to the Public, instead of carefully keeping the two separate and depriving congregants of the very concepts with which to promote human flourishing.

Lee studies law at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his wife Joanna live in Philadelphia.

Illustration courtesy of Seth T. Hahne. Check out Seth’s graphic novel and comic review site, Good Ok Bad.