IV. ANALYSIS FROM POLITICAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY: THE INTRINSIC GOODS OF MARRIAGE

The empirical evidence in support of marriage is clear. When it comes to the myriad goods of modern social life-economic well-being, safety and security, personal happiness, flourishing community, limited government-marriage is a boon to adults and especially children. But the rational defense of marriage need not be based solely in data about its utility, and those who choose to marry are not usually motivated, first and foremost, by any utilitarian calculus. Only when marriage is valued as good in itself, and not simply as a means to other good ends, will children, adults, and societies reap its profound benefits. This requires defenders of marriage-teachers, poets, religious leaders, parents and grandparents, role models of every kind-to describe and defend why marriage is a choiceworthy way of life in terms that resonate with lived human experience. Some moral philosophers have engaged in extended reflection on the nature of marriage as a profound human good, seeking by precise analysis to better understand what most people accept as a matter of commonsense. Not all signatories to this statement accept this natural law approach or perspective, but we include it here since it represents a view that some thoughtful supporters of marriage find compelling.

Marriage offers men and women as spouses a good they can have in no other way: a mutual and complete giving of the self. This act of reciprocal self-giving is made solemn in a covenant of fidelity-a vow to stand by one another as husband and wife amid life's joys and sorrows, and to raise the children that may come as the fruit of this personal, sexual, and familial union. Marriage binds two individuals together for life, and binds them jointly to the next generation that will follow in their footsteps. Marriage elevates, orders, and at times constrains our natural desires to the higher moral end of fidelity and care.

The marriage vow by its nature includes permanence and exclusivity: a couple would lose the very good of the union they seek if they saw their marriage as temporary, or as open to similar sharing with others. What exactly would a temporary promise to love mean? Would it not reduce one's spouse to a source of pleasure for oneself, to be desired and kept only so long as one's own desires are fulfilled? By weakening the permanence of marriage, the contemporary culture of divorce undermines the act of self-giving that is the foundation of marriage. The marriage vow, seen as binding, is meant to secure some measure of certainty in the face of life's many unknowns-the certainty that this unknown future will be faced together until death separates. At the same time, marriage looks beyond the married couple themselves to their potential offspring, who secure the future from this generation to the next.

Marriage is thus by its nature sexual. It gives a unique unitive and procreative meaning to the sexual drive, distinguishing marriage from other close bonds. The emotional, spiritual, and psychological closeness of a married couple is realized in the unique biological unity that occurs between a man and a woman united as husband and wife in sexual intercourse. In marital sexual union, the love of husband and wife is given concrete embodiment. Our bodies are not mere instruments. Our sexual selves are not mere genitalia. Male and female are made to relate to and complete one another, to find unity in complementarity and complementarity in sexual difference. The same sexual act that unites the spouses is also the act that creates new life. Sharing of lives is, in sex, also a potential sharing of life. In procreation, marital love finds its highest realization and expression. In the family, children find the safety, security, and support they need to reach their full potential, grounded in a public, prior commitment of mother and father to become one family together.

This deeper understanding of marriage is not narrowly religious. It is the articulation of certain universal truths about human experience, an account of the potential elevation of human nature in marriage that all human beings can rationally grasp. Many secular-minded couples desire these extraordinary things from marriage: a permanent and exclusive bond of love that unites men and women to each other and to their children.

But marriage cannot survive or flourish when the ideal of marriage is eviscerated. Radically different understandings of marriage, when given legal status, threaten to create a culture in which it is no longer possible for men and women to understand the unique goods that marriage embodies: the fidelity between men and women, united as potential mothers and fathers, bound to the children that the marital union might produce. Maintaining a culture that endorses the good of marriage is essential to ensuring that marriage serves the common good. And in a free society such as our own, a strong marriage culture also fosters liberty by encouraging adults to govern their own lives and rear their children responsibly.As honest advocates of same-sex marriage have conceded, to abandon the conjugal conception of marriage - the idea of marriage as a union of sexually complementary spouses - eliminates any ground of principle for limiting the number of partners in a marriage to two. It would open the door to legalizing polygamy and polyamory (group marriage), and produce a culture in which marriage loses its significance and standing, with disastrous results for children begotten and reared in a world of post-marital chaos.

The law has a crucial place in sustaining this deeper understanding of marriage and its myriad human goods. The law is a teacher, instructing the young either that marriage is a reality in which people can choose to participate but whose contours individuals cannot remake at will, or teaching the young that marriage is a mere convention, so malleable that individuals, couples, or groups can choose to make of it whatever suits their desires, interests, or subjective goals of the moment.Even as we defend the good of marriage as a way of life for individual men and women, therefore, we cannot ignore the culture and polity that sustain that way of life. Oxford University philosopher Joseph Raz, a self-described liberal, is rightly critical of those forms of liberalism which suppose that law and government can and should be neutral with respect to competing conceptions of moral goodness. As he put it:

Monogamy, assuming that it is the only valuable form of marriage, cannot be practiced by an individual. It requires a culture which recognizes it, and which supports it through the public's attitude and through its formal institutions.⁹⁹

Professor Raz's point is that if monogamy is indeed a key element in a sound understanding of marriage, this ideal needs to be preserved and promoted in law and in policy. The marriage culture cannot flourish in a society whose primary institutions-universities, courts, legislatures, religious institutions-not only fail to defend marriage but actually undermine it both conceptually and in practice. The young will never learn what it means to get married and stay married, to live in fidelity to the spouse they choose and the children they must care for, if the social world in which they come of age treats marriage as fungible or insignificant.