Outside the Beltway

LET NO GAYS PUT ASUNDER

James Joyner · Friday, October 17, 2003 · 1 comment

William J. Bennett makes, somewhat more eloquently, the Santorum argument in opposition to homosexual marriage.

The homosexual movement cannot tolerate the persistence of mores that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman, the marriage relationship as the proper context of sexual expression and the family as the unit formed around that nucleus.

To normalize homosexuality requires us to deny that man linked to woman is both natural and ideal — that it is the purpose of our human sexuality — and to affirm the aberrant view that sexuality is an arbitrary construct and choice.

The homosexual vanguard proposes to replace sexual identity — that inescapable fact of nature that we are created male and female — with sexual behavior as a fundamental organizing principle of society. And if sexual behavior is the determinant, then appetite is the guiding principle.

Without respect for sexual identity, sexual partners become nothing more than interchangeable parts, rather than complementary on the basis of nature. And if behavior and appetite are the only determinants of sexual conduct, what is the argument against polygamy, incest or any other imaginable sexual relationship?

While I’ve defended parts of this conclusion in several posts following the Santorum flap, I continue to say, So what?

Bennett makes a more general argument that I agree with:

What is broken should be restored, not redefined or destroyed.

But I’d posit that we’re neither going to fix nor destroy the male-female bond through legislation. Unlike the drug issue, surely no one seriously thinks that, if gays can get married, more people are going to become gay? Or that, denied the opportunity to marry, significantly more gays are going to switch to the other team, marry people of the other gender, and commence raising babies?