Comment & Debate
Margarette Somerville. “The case against gay marriage.” McGill Center for Medicine, Ethics and Law. April 29, 2003: “We now need the procreative symbolism of marriage more than in past, because of new technoscience possibilities for transmitting life, if we believe that, ethically, there should be limits on the use of these technologies. […] Marriage’s role in upholding respect for the transmission of human life — which is the first event in procreation — is of unusual importance at present. We are facing unprecedented challenges to that respect because of new technoscience that opens up unprecedented modes of transmission of life. That is another reason why marriage should remain limited to opposite-sex couples. Without it, we would have no institution that establishes a socialsexual ecology of human reproduction and symbolizes respect for the transmission of human life through sexual reproduction, as compared, for example, through asexual replication (cloning).”
Adam Kolasinksi. “The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage.” The Tech (M.I.T.) February 20th, 2004: “Some argue that the link between marriage and procreation is not as strong as it once was, and they are correct. Until recently, the primary purpose of marriage, in every society around the world, has been procreation. In the 20th century, Western societies have downplayed the procreative aspect of marriage, much to our detriment. As a result, the happiness of the parties to the marriage, rather than the good of the children or the social order, has become its primary end, with disastrous consequences. When married persons care more about themselves than their responsibilities to their children and society, they become more willing to abandon these responsibilities, leading to broken homes, a plummeting birthrate, and countless other social pathologies that have become rampant over the last 40 years. Homosexual marriage is not the cause for any of these pathologies, but it will exacerbate them, as the granting of marital benefits to a category of sexual relationships that are necessarily sterile can only widen the separation between marriage and procreation.”