Dr. Ryan T. Anderson — Making the Case for Man-Woman Marriage

Transcript (edited for readability).

Introduction (Emcee)

We're delighted that Dr. Ryan Anderson is able to be with us this afternoon, and that he was willing to travel in just for this occasion. He's been a welcome guest, as many of you know, in a number of LCMS gatherings over the last several years. He's always been well received and much appreciated. Those of you who know of him or know about him recognize that he is a social influencer. He is a scholar, he is an accomplished author. When you're looking for basic cred, all you have to do is check out his CV and find out the kinds of folks with whom he chats. ABC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC. He's got them all there, I think. And he's been published routinely by some of the most important periodicals and papers: The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Oxford University Press. And I just can't go on, or he wouldn't have time to speak.

His contemporary scholarship is particularly wonderful. He examines the intersections of philosophy and ethics and public policy in his work. Many of you are familiar with his writing. You might have seen Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, where he critically examines the legal and cultural shifts surrounding the definition of marriage in contemporary society, and we are all mightily interested in that. You'll see a number of his books noted for your attention in the reference in the presenter's biography in your folder. You may be most familiar with his book When Harry Became Sally, such a stunning bestseller regarding transgender truths, so popular that Amazon stopped selling it, as did Target, and it helped little bookstores throughout the country grow and become strong.

Important to this conference, he talks clearly. This man has a gift. He has a gift for communicating complex ideas in meaningful ways that all of us are aided in speaking clearly to our friends and the people in our world about what matters when it comes to marriage, family, and religious freedom. His dedication to these kinds of courageous and meaningful conversations have earned him recognition as a thought leader whom we are happy to have with us this afternoon. Please help me welcome Dr. Ryan Anderson.

Dr. Ryan T. Anderson

Great. Well, thank you. The microphone's working, you all can hear me? Perfect. It's a pleasure to be with you. I think I was with Doxology last in Iowa, and I think everyone's now going there. There's a big Iowa Family Forum this weekend with the presidential candidates. So we're in Wisconsin while that's going on. And I feel oddly at home in this chapel. And I think there must be a reason why. And anyone who knows my biography and the history of this particular chapel will know the inside joke there.

All right, so what I want to do with this session, what I've been asked to do, is to talk about marriage, and how we should continue to defend marriage, how we should continue to make kind of a public case for marriage, despite the fact that eight years ago the Supreme Court got it wrong. There's no reason why we, as believing Christians, should update our doctrines, as we've heard Hillary Clinton and other politicians say the church ought to. And there's no reason why we should think that the Obergefell decision is settled law any more than we accepted Roe v. Wade as settled law. We could acknowledge that the Supreme Court got Roe wrong. It took 49 years for the Supreme Court to finally admit they made a mistake with the Dobbs decision. And they got it wrong with Obergefell when they said that our U.S. Constitution requires a new definition of marriage, that somehow God's definition of marriage violates the U.S. Constitution, something that none of our founders would have ever thought, right? They didn't think that the U.S. Constitution or its guarantees for equal protection or due process of law somehow required a new understanding of what marriage is.

So what I want to do is just provide that understanding of what marriage is, the historic understanding of what marriage is, and not from a theological perspective. I'm not trained as a theologian. I'm trained as a philosopher. My PhD is in political philosophy in particular. And so what I want to do, if we think that faith and reason go hand in hand, and that what God has revealed to us in Scripture can't contradict what the best of reason gives to us. Bad reason will come at a different answer, but reason when it's done well, science when it's done well, will be perfectly compatible with what God has revealed in the Bible, right? And so there will be no tension between these truths. That's what I want to say this afternoon. And hopefully it'll be helpful in your pastoral ministry. It'll be helpful in your conversations with children, with grandchildren, people who say to you, "Oh, well, the Scriptures aren't reliable. They're not trustworthy. They must be wrong. We have to have some new hermeneutic to update them, to interpret them in accordance with the best of social justice." You can actually say, "No, we can trust the Bible, because it's authoritative, and you can go toe to toe on the philosophy, on the justice side," right? So that's the purpose of this afternoon's talk.

Let me start by saying, a few years ago, it's probably over a decade now, two co-authors of mine, Sherif Girgis, who was a classmate of mine at Princeton, and then Robby George, who's a professor at Princeton, one of the only conservative Christians who are kind of out of the closet at a place like Princeton, the three of us co-authored a book titled What Is Marriage? And the subtitle of that book was Man and Woman: A Defense. And the reason we titled the book that way was we thought that was the central question in the marriage debate. It wasn't marriage equality. All of us support marriage equality. Everyone in this chapel supports marriage equality, if you understand marriage correctly. What I mean by that is we want all marriages treated equally by the government. What we disagree about, what those of us in this chapel disagree with people in the secular world about, is what sort of consenting adult relationship is marital, right? That's the real disagreement. It's not a disagreement about equality. No one here thinks that we should have like a caste system of marriages where some marriages are treated better than other marriages. We think all real marriages should be treated equally, but we don't think every relationship that calls itself a marriage is in fact a marriage.

And so to answer the question of what in truth is a marriage, you actually need to have a theory of marriage, a philosophy of marriage, a theology of marriage. So we wanted to look at, well, what are the progressives proposing? When they put up that red equal sign on Facebook and Twitter and their bumper stickers, and they said, "I'm in favor of marriage equality," we would ask them, "But why? What is marriage? What do you think marriage is, so I can know whether or not we're talking about the same thing?" And what we discovered was that their vision of marriage was more or less like an intense, emotional, romantic, caregiving relationship. It's what the philosopher John Corvino, who teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit, calls your number one person. Marriage is about establishing who your number one person in life is, and that marriage is just like other types of relationships, other types of friendship, other types of companionship, except it has more of it. It has it to the nth degree. It has whatever normal friendships and relationships have, but it has it to the max. It has it to the highest level. And that's what makes marriage different than other relationships. It's more intense. It's emotionally more intense. It's romantically more intense, et cetera, et cetera.

All right, so when we discovered this, our criticism to people like Corvino was, well, look, you have no reason for actually defending the historic legal norms for marriage: monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence. Right? If marriage is just about an intense emotional, romantic, caregiving relationship, then why is it limited to your number one person? Why can't it be your number two people, your number three people? Right? If you go to the Supreme Court saying you want marriage equality for same-sex couples, why not same-sex throuples, or opposite-sex quartets? Right? If it's all about the intense emotions, the romance, the caregiving, there's nothing magical about the number two. There's no reason for an expectation of monogamy. If it's all about emotions and romance, well, emotions come and they go, they wax and they wane, why should it be permanent? Right? Why not have temporary marriages? If it's about emotions, why should it be exclusive, especially sexually exclusive? Right? And so right there, you have the three historic legal norms, in canon law but also in common law, in civil law, of monogamy, exclusivity, and permanency, and the new vision of marriage, the same vision that gives us gay marriage, can't explain any of them.

We then point out that on this vision of marriage, you also can't explain why the government should be in the marriage business. Right? The government's not in the baptism business, the government's not in the bar mitzvah business. Why do you want the government in the marriage business if marriage is just about intense emotional, romantic relationships? We don't have a registry for best friendship. Why do we have a government registry for marriage on this vision of marriage?

All right, last thing I will say before giving you an alternative theory of marriage is that this vision of marriage is not distinctively gay or lesbian. Many straight people have implicitly bought into this vision of marriage. This is the vision of marriage that comes out of the 1960s. This is the vision of marriage that comes out of the sexual revolution. This is a vision of marriage that, unfortunately, many of our churches are preaching. Right? Many, I mean, hopefully not LCMS, but there are other four-letter-acronym Lutheran denominations that might be advancing this vision of marriage, right? And in my own church, there are divisions between how we understand what marriage is.

And if you think about what came out of the 1960s, the sexual revolution, it's the hookup culture, it's cohabitation before marriage, it's the normalization of premarital sex. It's the rise of non-marital childbearing. It's the introduction of no-fault divorce laws. It's the more than doubling in the rates of divorce, right? All of those things culturally take place for two generations before we then get to the legal redefinition of marriage, right? And so it was straight people who bought into a bad vision of marriage, where consenting adults should do sexually whatever consenting adults want to do sexually, and love equals a family, and marriage should last as long as the love lasts, right? Gays and lesbians didn't create any of those ideas. They then said, "Look, your cultural redefinition of marriage, we want in on it too." And they went to the Supreme Court, and they got five unelected judges to then say, "Well, look, you guys aren't taking monogamy, exclusivity, or permanence very seriously, why should we take sexual complementarity seriously, either?" Right? And so there's a cultural logic to the legal redefinition of marriage that first takes place over 50 years of family breakdown, with all of the consequences of the sexual revolution.

Okay, but it's a logic that's a faulty train of logic, right? It's a bad train of logic. In the same way that Peter Singer, there's some logical consistency when Peter Singer says, "Oh yeah, I'm not just in favor of aborting babies. I'm also in favor of infanticide and euthanizing grandma." Like, he's being logically consistent, but it's a bad form of logic. Same thing is true here. By the time I finish this first presentation, I'll talk about the consequences of redefining marriage legally. But I want to first propose what an alternative vision of marriage is.

And so in the remaining time, I want to do three things. I want to first give a philosophy of what marriage is that explains how faith and reason go together and how the best of philosophy corresponds with the best of theology, and there's no contradiction, there's no tension between faith and reason when it comes to what marriage is. Second, I want to say a little bit about why is the state in the marriage business. We don't have the state in the baptism business. I would imagine none of us want the state to be in the baptism business. But why do we have government involved in the marriage business? So that'll be the second part. And then the third part: what are the consequences of legally redefining marriage? So that's what I hope to accomplish.

All right, so for this first part, what is marriage? The way that Sherif, Robby, and I answer this is by looking to a Greek philosopher, Aristotle. And Aristotle teaches that we can analyze any sort of institution, any sort of community, by looking at three things that the community does. Look at the actions that it performs, look at the goods that it seeks, and then look at the norms that govern the life of the community. So there are common actions, common goods, and common norms. And since we're at a seminary, a university, we can use an intellectual community as the example of how this theory works, and then I'll apply it to marriage.

So think about academic actions. We're engaged in academic actions, intellectual actions, right now. When you go to a university, professors give lectures, students attend lectures, professors research and write books, students then read those books, they take notes, professors write exams, students take the exams, students write term papers, professors grade term papers, right? This is the bread and butter of university life. This is the exchange of ideas, of arguments, of evidence, right? And so it's rational discourse in pursuit of the truth, right? And that's the second part. It's common actions that are ordered towards common goods. In this case, it's knowledge of the truth, right? A real education isn't about defending preconceived opinions, it's not about indoctrination, it's not about activism, whether it's social justice or other types. A real education is meant to get rid of ignorance, get rid of false beliefs, false opinions, and arrive at knowledge of the truth.

So we have common actions ordered towards a common good, the truth, and then part three, that explains why we have various norms, various commitments that members of an intellectual community, members of a university community, make to themselves. This is where things like academic integrity, an honor code, academic freedom, but also with academic freedom comes certain responsibilities, not to cheat on your papers, not to plagiarize your papers. If you're a scientist, not to falsify your data, right? And the reason we have both intellectual freedom and intellectual integrity is precisely to make those actions best pursue and be best ordered towards the good of the truth. A good researcher is happy when another researcher corrects a mistake that he or she made. A bad intellectual gets all defensive, and they try to defend their preconceived conclusion. A good researcher is grateful. They say, "Thank you. I made a mistake. Now we both have a better conception of the truth." All right? You can see how you would need to have a certain amount of freedom to engage in those sorts of actions, but you would also need to have certain standards, where you cite all of your sources, you report all of the data precisely, so other people could then check your work.

Okay, let me apply it. And the sad, one moment of commentary. The sad reality is so few of our universities actually look like that, right? The vast majority of our universities are about defending preconceived opinion and indoctrinating students for a life of activism, right? And it's the minority of our universities that actually engage in serious intellectual pursuit of the truth, with an understanding of both academic freedom and academic honesty and integrity. That's a lecture for another Doxology.

All right, let me apply it to marriage, though. So what are the common actions that spouses engage in that are ordered towards common goods, and then what are the common norms that govern the life of marriage, that are distinct from ordinary friendships, distinct from other forms of emotional relationships? We argue that marriage is a comprehensive relationship. And this is what sets it apart from business partnerships or friendships, or even religious communities, right? What makes marriage distinct from other types of human association is the comprehensiveness of the relationship, and it's comprehensive on precisely those three domains. There's a comprehensive action that unites spouses with respect to all aspects of their humanity. So it's a union of bodies, minds, and souls. So that'll be part one, common action. Part two, it's ordered towards a common good, and it's a comprehensive common good, the creation, and then the rearing, of new human life. And then part three, it calls for comprehensive commitments, a comprehensive commitment throughout time, till death do us part, and a comprehensive commitment at every moment in time, forsaking all others, right, an exclusive commitment. I give myself wholly to you, which means I'm not giving myself to anyone else. So it's comprehensive in the sense that I'm foreclosing this type of union with anyone other than my wife. I'm committing myself to my wife, till death do us part, for better or for worse, richer, poorer, sicker, or in health. We're uniting in a distinctive action that's ordered towards a distinctive good.

Let me unpack this. This is the densest part of both of this afternoon's lectures that I'm delivering. So if you get through the next ten minutes, everything else will be smooth sailing. But this is the kind of nitty-gritty Aristotelian philosophy where we can look at a sound philosophical vision of marriage, and see that it's entirely compatible and, in fact, complementary to what the Bible teaches us.

All right, so first part. We argue that there's a distinctive action, there's like their academic actions, their religious actions, there's a marital act, that can unite spouses at all levels of their personhood, all levels of their humanity. So if you want to answer the question, all right, well, how do you do that? You have to know something about what human beings are. And so part of what we argue is that human beings are not just ghosts and machines. We're not just a soul that somehow inhabits a body like a costume, where our bodies are just kind of like raw matter, silly putty, that we can refashion. And tomorrow is talking about the transgender phenomenon, and that dualism where the body is just a vehicle of the real self, and I can refashion my body. That's what's going on in the transgender ideology. It's also what's going on in some of the gay marriage ideology. The body is unimportant.

On a sound understanding, we are embodied souls, or we are ensouled bodies, but we're a dynamic unity, and necessarily an integrative unity of mind and matter, body and soul. From a theological perspective, this is why the incarnation is so important, right? Jesus is not just playing dress-up. He truly becomes human, truly becomes man, truly becomes flesh. And this is also why the resurrection of the body is so important. That's why St. Paul says we would be the most pitiable if the resurrection of the body isn't real, right? Because the body is part of who we are. And so when we're in heaven, it's going to be a unity of both body and soul. So philosophically, Aristotle could see this, right, where hylomorphism is the Greek understanding of both form and matter.

All right, so if I'm a bodily being, that means for me to unite comprehensively with another person, it would need to be a union of hearts and minds, which is what a friendship is, right? I unite with my friends a union of heart and mind, but it would also have to have a bodily union. So to unite comprehensively with another person, I have to unite hearts, minds, and bodies with another person. You don't ordinarily unite bodily with your friends, or at least you shouldn't unite bodily with your friends. All right, so then the question becomes, all right, well, how do you unite bodily with another person? If I lick my finger and stick it in your ear, have we united bodily? No, it's a wet willy, right? We're all familiar with this phenomenon, if you have younger brothers or sisters, or, for that matter, older brothers and sisters.

So our thought was, well, how do you unite comprehensively with another body? Well, what makes me one body? And this will have relevance for the abortion debate. What makes me one body is that I'm an integrated unity of all of my various bodily systems and parts. My skin, my muscle, my bones, my heart, my lungs, kidney, liver, et cetera, et cetera. All of my various organs are integrated for an organismal whole. This is why we can say that we have various organs that are organized with respect to the organism as a whole. And you can think of this, that your heart is for the circulatory system, your lungs are for the respiratory system, and we're complete as individuals. All of us are breathing right now as individuals, right? Respiratory system. All of us, our hearts are pumping, our blood circulating, circulatory system. Or digesting our lunch, the digestive system. Locomotion, we all walked into the chapel on our own. And so you can see how we're complete as a bodily organism for all these various systems.

Well, there's one system where we are radically incomplete. And we each have half of this system, so that in order to engage in a certain type of action, you can only engage in this type of action if you engage in it with another person of the opposite bodily structure, right? And the word I paused over there is the opposite sex, right? So to engage in a reproductive-type act, so that you have a reproductive action regardless of whether or not 24 hours later sperm meets egg, right, you would have to engage in that action, and it will unite you comprehensively with respect to that system, right? So we each have half of a reproductive system. When we come together, we can unite as one flesh, right? When the Bible, Genesis, talks about a one-flesh union, it's not speaking merely poetically or metaphorically. It's a truth of human nature at both the physical and the metaphysical level, that when a man and a woman unite as one flesh, as husband and wife, they truly form a comprehensive union. They become one body with respect to the common action that they are engaged in, so much so that nine months later it might require a name, right?

And that tells us something, that the lovemaking action is also the life-giving action. And this is by design, right? God has designed it precisely this way, that the very act that can unite a man and a woman as husband and wife is also the act that could make them mother and father. And that these things are meant to go together. And so if you think about it, the action that unites man and woman as husband and wife, that comprehensive action that unites them as one flesh, what is it ordered towards? It's ordered towards both the unity of the spouses and the procreation of new life. And it's not just the procreation of new life. The way that, we live on a farm, we have goats and sheep and rabbits and chickens and a cow and pigs, they reproduce and then they kind of abandon their children, right? The way that humans do it, right, it's both you unite as one flesh, unity, procreation, and then the rearing of family life, right?

We argue this is a comprehensive good. And what do we mean by that? Think about other goods that you could pursue in life. I'm pursuing the good of graduating from college. I'm pursuing the good of getting my first job. I'm pursuing the good of winning the case, if I'm a lawyer, I'm trying. I'm pursuing the good of preparing Thanksgiving dinner. Whatever, you might have these discrete, tangible, finite goods. All right, now compare that to, I've created a new locus of existence, of meaning, right? A new human being. This is about as comprehensive of a good that we could pursue short of the beatific vision. I mean, I think, honestly, short of what we will experience in the kingdom of God, the creation of a new life, and then raising that new life to the point where it's more or less, I don't want to say autonomous, but responsible, where it's reached a stage of maturity where it can now leave the home and go out on its own. That's what family life is going to be about.

And that's a comprehensive good, both in the sense that the new human life is him or herself a locus of infinite worth and value. But then also, what does it require of husband and wife, of mother and father, to raise that new life? We have four kids, ages five and under. And what I'm very quickly discovering firsthand, what I had theorized a decade ago, I'm now experiencing very firsthand, is it requires a comprehensive form of cooperation, of a common life, that spouses now engage in, to raise their children, to appreciate human goodness in all of its rich variety, right? Because what conscientious parents want for their kids is for them to experience beauty, and truth, and knowledge, and friendship, and, you know, go down the list of the things that you would desire for your children. And you see it's comprehensive in that nature as well. Whereas like a business partnership, it's a much more limited range of goods that you're seeking. A sports partnership, much more limited.

All right, then lastly, if there's a common act that unites spouses comprehensively, if there's a common good that is a comprehensive good that spouses are inherently ordered towards, what about these comprehensive commitments? I mentioned one, it's comprehensive throughout time, till death do us part, right? And what you're saying here, and this is why no-fault divorce and prenups and things like this can really be a bad idea, because if you go in with the mindset of, there's an escape clause, there's a way out, then you're kind of holding something back. But what marriage is saying is, I'm all in. And we don't make all-in commitments to more or less anyone else. I mean, the nearest parallel would be like religious life, ordination, or, in the case of this chapel, nuns, convents, things like this. We can agree to disagree about that example. But the idea would be, your business partnership isn't a comprehensive, till-death-do-us-part relationship. Your freshman-year roommate at college isn't. Your first job that you take out of college. Your next-door neighbor, right? You might move. You're not pledging to live in the same house till death. Marriage uniquely calls for this comprehensive commitment throughout time, and that's why marriage, of kind of earthly relationships, is the only one that requires a permanent commitment.

Second part, marriage also requires an exclusive commitment. And the type of exclusivity that it calls for is exclusivity with respect to the marital act, right? Marriage doesn't require intellectual exclusivity, right? If any of you are attending this lecture without your spouse, you're not cheating on your spouse. Marriage doesn't require athletic exclusivity. If you go to the gym or you walk around a track with someone other than your spouse, you're not cheating on your spouse. What marriage requires is sexual exclusivity, precisely because it's that sexual act that can transform a relationship of hearts and minds, an ordinary friendship, into the comprehensive domain. And that's why the bright-line form of cheating on your spouse is precisely when you engage in a comprehensive action with someone to whom you are not comprehensively committed, right? This also explains why premarital sex is wrong, why non-marital sex is wrong.

Like, we can give an answer at the philosophical level about what marriage is, why it can only be between a husband and a wife, why it's inherently ordered towards children and family life, why they're not like an optional accessory item, and why it calls for monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence. We can give a coherent vision of this, whereas, as I mentioned earlier, the revisionist account of marriage, the number one best person, it's really kind of parasitic on this understanding of marriage, right? And it dissolves this understanding of marriage. That is what we have witnessed for the past now 60 years, more or less, since the sexual revolution. We've seen all of these things, monogamy, exclusivity, permanence, and now complementarity, we've seen all four of those aspects of marriage slowly get more and more weakened.

Okay, so that's the end of part one. Let me look at the time. All right, we're good. Second thing I want to say is, why does this matter for government? Because it's one thing to say, all right, this is a conference of Lutherans, our pastors are solid on this, the church is solid on this, why should we care what the law says? Why is the government in the marriage business? Because, as I said earlier, none of us want the government in the baptism business. That's because marriage performs dual duty. Marriage is both a sacred religious institution, and it's a natural civil institution. Marriage is a creational ordinance that you can then think of Jesus elevating to a sacramental level, or to a covenantal level. Different communions will have different theologies of marriage, and how they think about either the sacrament or the covenant or the ordinance of marriage. But where we agree is that it's both a natural institution and a supernatural institution.

We want non-Christians to get married and to stay married, right? Marriage isn't just for the church. It's not just for believers. Atheists can and should get married and stay married. And as a result, you're going to want to have, if it's an institution that has kind of a dual foundation, both a foundation in nature, when God creates us male and female, he also tells us to be fruitful and multiply, right? So it's a creational ordinance for all of creation, and it's a sacred institution, an institution that belongs both to the state and to the church, which means both institutions are going to have valid claims on it. What this also means is that both institutions need to define marriage accurately. Neither institution is free to redefine marriage, right? The church isn't free to redefine what marriage is, nor is the state free to redefine what marriage is, right? Both institutions should recognize the truth of what marriage is, and then within their proper jurisdictions govern marriage appropriately.

Why does this particularly matter on the governmental side of this? Because marriage serves a civic purpose apart from any sacred purposes that we can also discuss about marriage. The civic purpose of marriage is that marriage exists to bring that man and that woman together as husband and wife to then be mother and father to any kids they produce. The state needs a next generation of citizens in order for the political community to survive, but the state can't directly produce that next generation of citizens, nor can the state effectively raise the next generation of citizens. So as a civic institution, marriage is based on kind of three secular truths: an anthropological truth that men and women are distinct and complementary, a biological fact that reproduction requires both a man and a woman, and then a social reality that children deserve both a mother and a father.

Whenever a baby is born, a mother is always close by. She's normally in the same room. Now, the question is, will a father be close by, and if so, for how long? And marriage as a civic institution is an institution that we have found all across the globe, all throughout human history, that political communities use to maximize the likelihood that that man commits to that woman, and then the two of them, committed to each other, will then commit to that child. When this doesn't happen, right, either because marriages don't form to begin with, or because they fall apart prematurely, that's where you see a rise in all of the kind of social dysfunction that the state wants to avoid. So the increase in crime, the decrease in graduation rates, the increase in unemployment, the decrease in mental and social well-being, right? All of those things are directly tied to your family of origin. Children who grow up without their married mother and father have much higher, unfortunately, rates of poor outcomes.

Let me read you a statistic on this, and then I'll ask you which conservative said it. "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves, and the foundations of our community are weaker because of it." Who was the speaker? Was that Dr. James Dobson? Was that Pope John Paul II? It was President Obama, before he evolved, before his evolution on the marriage question. It was in a commencement speech that he gave at Morehouse College, a historically black college. And what he said was, and you think about it, the reason I highlight that is 73 percent of black babies in the United States today are born outside of marriage. And what he said was, "I have tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father was not for my mother and me. I want to break that cycle." But how do we insist that fathers are essential when the law redefines marriage to make fathers optional, right? That's the question that Obama could never answer.

And part of this is based on the reality that there's no such thing as parenting. There's mothering and there's fathering. Something else that I wrote about academically a decade ago that I'm now experiencing very immediately on a firsthand basis. If I told you it's Saturday morning, so tomorrow morning, and one parent is in the living room wrestling with a five-year-old boy, and this parent is teaching the five-year-old boy it's okay to do headlocks, but it's not okay to bite or to pull hair or to gouge eyes, which parent is most likely in the living room? Right, and the laughter gives away that we all know, it's probably the father. And it's not because of some like global, international, historical conspiracy in which fathers wrestle with little boys and mothers can't. It's that this is what comes naturally to dads. This is the type of, the sociologists call it rough-and-tumble play, that dads really enjoy. In the same way that who's more likely to be throwing the newborn baby up in the air, and who's more likely to say, "Honey, not so high," right? They're different gifts that we have naturally, intuitively, right? Fathers are much more likely to encourage their kids to take risks, to push the envelope, just a little bit. Mothers are much more nurturing, much more comforting, right? And that's why kids sometimes seek out their dads, sometimes they seek out their moms, right? They know what it is that they need, which parent is more likely to give it to them.

All the social science we have, children turn out best when they have both, the maternal and the paternal, the masculine and the feminine. These things are important. You step back, look at the social science, right? What the dad's doing with the five-year-old boy when he's wrestling, what the dad's doing with the ten-year-old boy when he's like tossing a football in the backyard, what the dad's doing with the fifteen-year-old boy when he's helping him tie a tie for his first high school dance, he's helping his son navigate a difficult developmental pathway of going from a boy to a man. And when that pathway isn't successfully navigated, that's where you see distinctively masculine tendencies can go in a destructive rather than a constructive direction. The increase in crime, the decrease in employment, the increase in drug use, the decrease in graduation rates, right? All those things, or how you could take masculine tendencies and put them in a more destructive direction. Who helps you navigate that pathway? It's your dad.

Flip side, what do dads do for their daughters? Dads tend to be the ones who scare away bad boyfriends. Dads tend to, for the most part, be larger than moms. They tend to be stronger than moms. They tend to have deeper voices than moms. They tend to have once been a young man themselves. And I'm joking when I say they tend to, because of the transgender phenomenon. These are realities, right? The father is going to be stronger, have a deeper voice. He knows what the wrong sort of young man is looking for from his daughter, right? And so he tends to police who it is that's pursuing his daughter. You step back from the funny anecdote, look at the data. Girls who grow up without their dads are more likely to start sexual activity earlier in life, more likely to be pregnant outside of marriage, more likely to have an abortion. One of the things that the father does for his daughter is protect her innocence, right, and protect the space for her to develop and to mature as a woman without pressures from men who are, or from boys and men, for that matter, who are seeking things that are inappropriate.

We, at the time when we were debating gay marriage, we didn't have good social science on same-sex parents. The social science that we now have that is somewhat good shows that these same realities matter. That what matters for kids is stability. Same-sex relationships, even when they have legal recognition as marriages, are shorter lived than opposite-sex relationships. What matters for kids is biological connection, which is one reason why even when you adopt a child at infancy, there still tends to be additional struggles than for parents who raise their biological kids. That's not a knock on adoption. It's to say that biology matters, stability matters, and then gender matters, having both a mother and a father matters, because men and women bring different gifts to family life.

Why does the state care about any of this? Because when you don't have marriages, and when you don't have fathers in particular, because when we talk about single parents, it's normally the heroic single mother who's actually caring for the kids while the deadbeat dad refused to man up and he abandoned the family, right? Everything you could care about, if you care about social justice, if you care about limited government, when you don't have strong families, that's when you have the increase of the welfare state and the increase of the police state, right? The government tries to become the provider and the disciplinarian, which are true roles that historically the father would have provided, right? And so you can see how the breakdown of marriage, and unfortunately the legal redefinition of marriage, is only accelerating those trends.

So that's where I want to wrap up. I want to mention four consequences of the legal redefinition of marriage, and why we should still care about marriage, both ecclesially, why we should care inside of our church communion to get it right, but also why we should still care about marriage politically, and we should do whatever we can do to solidify marriage. All four of these consequences fall under the rubric of "ideas have consequences." Bad ideas have bad consequences. In some cases, bad ideas have victims. What we've done is we replaced one vision of what marriage is with a different vision of what marriage is. Our laws shape our culture, the culture shapes our beliefs, and then our beliefs shape our actions. And so here's how we're already seeing this new vision of marriage play out.

First, we have no public institution, because religion has been privatized, right? This is one of the problems with secularism. If the only thing that counts as public is the law, the government, we have no public institution that even says, as an ideal, a child deserves both a mother and a father. And in fact, if you say a child has a right to a mother and a father, you can be accused of hate speech. You can be run off of a secular progressive college campus, right? I can say it on this campus. Imagine if I was at Princeton University, my alma mater, and I was to say a child has a right to a mother and a father. And so you can see how the legal redefinition of it even changed our expectations of what justice for children looks like. The question that I posed to Obama, how do we say fathers are essential when the law has said fathers are optional? Redefining marriage is done to put a new principle in law: marriage is primarily about the emotional satisfaction, the romantic satisfaction, of adults, right? It's about the desires of adults, not the needs or the rights of children, right? And so it's decentered marriage.

The comprehensive vision of marriage is that marriage was about both the union of the spouses and the overflowing of that love into the next generation, right? The generative act creates the next generation, so the couple is generous. You can see how all of those "gen" words flow from the same root source. What we've done instead, as we said, "Nope, it's just about the consenting adults." And then children are like an added optional add-on, right? You've got to get a surrogate womb, a surrogate, an egg donor, a sperm donor, a variety of ways to do this, but there's nothing intrinsically that connects the love between the spouses and then this next generation, on the new vision of marriage. So that's part one.

Part two. There's no reason to think the redefinition of marriage will stop here. And I've already hinted at some of those cultural redefinitions of marriage, that now we see law review articles in places like the Harvard Law Review that are requesting this. And so I want to introduce you to three new words, one of which I previewed earlier. The first word is the term throuple, which is a three-person couple. And this was in a New York magazine back in 2013. And what they said was, well, look, once we get rid of the bigoted, homophobic, outdated understanding of marriage where it's a man and a woman couple, well, there's nothing magical about couples, right? If you go to the Supreme Court and you say we want marriage equality for same-sex couples, why not marriage equality for same-sex throuples? Or the opposite-sex quartet? The word throuple is just "couple," chop off the C, and then add "thr" for three, throuple. And there's a logical consistency to this. The way that we got at monogamy was, it's one man and one woman who can unite as one flesh and then create new life and attach that new life with one mother and one father, right? Monogamy starts with "mono," meaning one, right? It's taking two and making it one. But once we're no longer talking about a one-flesh union, why should we keep the number two? There's nothing magical about twosomes just as such. All right, so throuple.

Next term is monogamish. This was in the New York Times Sunday magazine. It was a gay rights activist, Dan Savage. And the title of the article was "Married, comma, with Infidelities." And the question the reporter posed to Savage was, what can straight couples learn from gay couples? And he said, they can learn the virtue of the open relationship. And that what we've historically referred to as infidelity, fidelity is an unrealistic expectation. No one person can fulfill all of your needs. And so what he was arguing is that, look, we might want to just have monogamy for the sake of, like, who's going to be on the mortgage, who's going to be sharing the utility bill. But when it comes to sexual activity, provided there's no deception and no coercion, you should be free to find sexual satisfaction outside of marriage. And it's a well-known phenomenon that particularly same-sex male couples tend to be very promiscuous. And what Dan was arguing was that in our culture, in our communities, this isn't viewed as a downside. This is actually something that makes the relationships spicier.

All right, last term, wedlease. So it's a play on the word wedlock. Wedlock conjures up an image of a lock, right? Something that's strong, sturdy, secure. I've locked it in, till death do us part. Well, wedlease conjures a different image. It's a lease. And just like you could lease a car or lease a house, you should be able to lease a spouse. And the idea here, this was in the Washington Post, it was a divorce attorney saying, look, it's unrealistic to think that you could have a till-death-do-you-part commitment. So Dan Savage was challenging the exclusive part. The divorce attorney was challenging the permanent part, and saying, rather than entering into marriage with an expectation of permanence, and then discovering you can't actually fulfill that expectation, and then having the heartbreak of divorce, what if you just signed up for a five-year wedlease? And then you can always renew your lease if it's going well. Some people lease their cars; if they like the car, they renew it. Some people lease their office space; if they like it, they renew it. Do the same thing with your wife. If things are going well after five years, you can renew your wedlease. If it's not, well, look, you just walk away. You only signed up for five years.

All right, these three new words. What was fascinating to me about all of them and the articles that introduced them, none of them discussed children. All three of them were focused on the desires of the adults. Whether it's a three-person, a four-person, a five-person relationship, whether it's an open relationship, or a closed exclusive relationship, whether it's a permanent relationship, or a temporary relationship, it's all about the consenting adult romance. And who are the victims? It's the children. Because if you increase the number of your sexual partners, and then you decrease the amount of commitment that you make to your sexual partners, either because you're not going to have a long relationship or you're not going to have an exclusive commitment, what's the most likely outcome? Fragmented families and fatherless kids. Because if I have lots of different sexual partners, and if I'm not very committed to my lots of sexual partners, chances are multiple sexual partners will get pregnant, I'll have multiple children with multiple women, and I'm not going to be committed to any of them. And that's the cycle that unfortunately we're seeing. And again, gay marriage didn't cause it, right, culturally it was playing out before. But the legal redefinition of marriage now gives a name to, to then legitimize, and possibly to like legally enshrine, these alternative family structures. And you're increasingly seeing various social justice people saying there's no such thing as the family. There are lots of different types of family. And the type of equality we should have is treating all family types equally. And that would mean the throuple, the wedlease, the monogamish relationship, et cetera, et cetera.

All right, third consequence is to unborn human life. And you could think, right, this is a little counterintuitive, like, how does gay marriage have anything to do with unborn babies? Because, at least in theory, two men or two women can't have a child, so how are they killing a child? And so I want to explain this in two parts. First is the worldview. The worldview that gave us gay marriage is the same worldview that gives us unplanned pregnancy, that gives us abortion. Because the worldview is, consenting adults should do sexually whatever consenting adults want to do. And so the wedlease, the monogamish relationship, the throuple, all of those things, if I create babies with multiple women, the odds are also pretty good that several of those women will abort their children. The safest place for a child to be conceived is inside of marriage. Four percent of babies conceived inside of marriage are aborted; 40 percent of babies conceived outside of marriage are aborted. It's a huge difference. Marriage is the greatest protector both of women and of children that God has designed. That's why he designed it, right?

So there's a consequence here. It's possible that you could be in favor of gay marriage and be in favor of chastity. But as a practical reality, I've never heard a gay marriage activist also be an advocate of chastity. It's a logical possibility, but the practical reality is that they're also not calling for a kind of a ban on premarital sex, or even a social expectation that you don't have premarital sex. The worldview that gives us same-sex marriage is also the worldview that gives us premarital and non-marital sexual activity, which gives us non-marital conceptions, which gives us the abortion rate. So that's one way that a redefinition of marriage actually threatens unborn human life.

The second way is that a lot of same-sex couples want, quote, "a child of our own," which means they don't want to adopt a baby out of the foster care system, or out of, you know, a woman in need. They want to create a child of their own. And unfortunately, you've seen the pictures, Secretary Buttigieg and his same-sex partner. For some reason, they were in a maternity bed holding the baby. Neither of them had given birth to that child. So it's unclear why the posed picture was taking place in a hospital bed. But what most likely happened is that they bought someone's eggs, they rented someone's womb, and they intentionally created a child to then deny that child a relationship with a mother, right? Absentee mothers are just as tragic as absentee dads.

What do we know about egg donors? They don't actually donate; they're paid for this. And with surrogacy, it tends not to be, like, upper-middle-class, well-educated women who sell their eggs. It tends to be women who are on the margins of life, women who are desperate, women who think, like, I need money so badly, I'm willing to undergo a highly invasive procedure, which may damage my ovaries for life, where they're going to hyperstimulate my ovaries in order to harvest, like, 20 of my eggs. And then I'm going to sell the eggs, right? So this tends to be women who are in economically dire straits. And so there are questions about exploitation. So that's one issue. What they'll then do is they'll take those 20 eggs, they might fertilize all 20 of them, freeze 10 embryos, right? There we have 10 embryonic human beings that are kept in like cryopreservation. They'll then implant 10 embryos, because even though they transfer 10 embryos to the womb, not all of them will fully implant. Then they'll do the euphemistic phrase, "selective reduction," right? Because no one wants to be Octomom. You remember the lady that had eight babies, because when they implanted the 10 embryos, I think two of them didn't fully implant, the eight that did implant, she kept all of them. Most people want the one designer baby, right? And so what ends up happening is they abort, they destroy, the other seven, right?

So when you hear someone talking about surrogacy and egg harvesting, realize that there are problems for the women. Also, who's most likely to rent their womb for nine months? Right, it tends not to be the economically upper-middle-class, well-educated woman who wants to be the surrogate mother. It tends to be the woman who's on the periphery of life, the woman who's already economically marginalized, who thinks my best chance of happiness in life is to rent my womb for nine months, right? So there's exploitation of women, both with the egg harvesting and with the womb renting. And then there are literally, at this point, thousands of children who are frozen, and thousands of children who have been intentionally destroyed in the womb. And then there are thousands of kids who have been created to be denied a relationship with either a mother or a father. So there are a whole host of pro-life concerns.

And the last thing I'll mention, and then we can stop after this, because it'll segue nicely to my next talk, is there are a whole host of religious liberty concerns. And again, the religious liberty concerns are not accidental. They're by design. Because the legal redefinition of marriage wasn't just so that two men or two women could get a piece of paper from the government so that they could file a joint tax return and visit each other in the hospital. The legal redefinition of marriage was a stepping stone towards a cultural redefinition of marriage. The legal redefinition of marriage was a means towards the end of eliminating dissent, eliminating opposition. This is why Hillary Clinton said the churches would have to update their doctrines. This is why they keep harassing the baker, the florist, the photographer, the adoption agency, the Lutheran schools, the Lutheran adoption agencies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Because if there's any opposition, even private opposition, even religious opposition, even a parochial school, even one baker in the entire state who refuses to bend the knee, refuses to go along and affirm and endorse and support this new vision of marriage, they have to eliminate dissent. And that's why you see all of these religious liberty concerns. It's not accidental, right?

Realize that the political, legal push for same-sex marriage is part of a larger cultural push for the social acceptance of kind of an LGBT worldview. And Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, stands in the way of that. That's why Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish school in New York City, is being sued because it won't allow an LGBT student group on campus, right? This is where we're going to see, just like during the Little Sisters of the Poor case, we're going to have to join hands across confessional divides to realize that if you can force the nuns to violate their beliefs when it comes to contraception, if you can force the Orthodox rabbis to violate their beliefs when it comes to marriage, they can do the same to you.