Marriage and Sexuality – Sherif Girgis

Transcript (edited for readability).

Well, thank you so much. It's a huge honor to be here. It really is. My standard fare is to go defend the most hated conservative position on the most heated issue at the most socially liberal law schools in the country. So this is a very welcome break.

It's also, really, it is a huge honor. I love the idea of the conference, finding our voice. But given that that is the point of the conference, I feel like a guest who's been brought into a family conversation, and I'm very privileged to be so. And on the other hand, I feel like you've already found your voice with a president like President Harrison, and the vision of what's at stake that he has given you. That's really an encapsulation of the whole conference, I anticipate.

I want to do just two things in this talk and then in the talk after lunch. I want to talk with you a little bit about that long tradition of natural law reasoning that's our patrimony in the West, in the Christianized civilization until recently that we call the West. And I want to give you, in particular, an insight into how the arguments can go on sex and marriage—what that 2000-year tradition of reasoning has to say about those things.

And when we talk about sex and marriage, especially the idea of marriage as a union of a man and a woman, we're going to be talking about bedrock—stuff that until recently, people didn't think they had to have a unique and very pointed defense of. So it's going to be heavy duty at points. When you have to defend the most basic things, it can sound a little unfamiliar, because it's what you take for granted and used to argue for everything else. So it'll be a little bit heavy going, but I'm going to try to flag the points where that's true, and I'm going to try to leave time for Q and A.

And then in the second talk after lunch, we're going to talk a lot more practically about what to do in these conversations, about how to have them productively. And there I'll try to draw on my own and my colleagues' experience talking to people across the spectrum: fellow Christians who are unconvinced, secularists, atheists who think we're, you know, the devil's spawn, and everybody in between. And I will look forward to Q and A in that session as well. And in this one, and then, of course, during the panel later on.

Well, let's start with the marriage debate. The first problem is the framing. We've got the framing all wrong. Everybody thinks about it as a matter of equality. It's not about equality. Everybody in the marriage debate agrees that every human being is equal, made in the image and likeness of God we would add, possessed of profound, inherent, and equal dignity. We all agree that every marriage should be recognized on an equal basis. You shouldn't have arbitrary lines drawn in your marriage law.

The whole question of the debate is what needs equal recognition in the first place. What marriage is, and why it's recognized? And that'll tell you when equality is being violated by a particular marriage law or not. It'll tell you when it's a marriage that's being denied recognition unfairly, unjustly, and when it's something else entirely. So it's not about equality. We all agree on that. The whole question is what to recognize equally.

It's not about tradition. When we're desperate, or when it's a 30-second soundbite for a politician and they have to draw on something, they'll often say, well, I believe in a man and a woman because that's how we've always done it. And of course, tradition can be a source of deep wisdom. If something's always been done a certain way, you ought to stop and ask why that's so. So it's a hint, it's a clue. But by itself, it's not an argument. We're not going to have to rely on the idea that it's right just because it's always been done.

And it's also not primarily about homosexuality. This debate did not start in 2013 with the Windsor decision striking down DOMA. It didn't start in 2003 with the first state court decision in Massachusetts requiring a state to recognize same-sex relationships as marriages. Because it's not the homosexuality debate. It's the marriage debate. It has roots much farther back. It's the same debate in a different form that we were fighting—or I was too young, but other people were fighting—in no-fault divorce in the '70s and '80s. It's the debate that has something to do with cohabitation and pornography, and everything else, all the legacy of the sexual revolution.

It's a debate between two visions of marriage: what it's about and what it's for. The new view, what I'm going to call the revisionist view of marriage, says marriage is mainly, at its best, about your soul mate. It's about your number one bond. It's about a deep emotional union. That's what makes it different from other types of relationship. Because you can just think about it. The other side doesn't do a very good job of spelling out what they think marriage is. They'll tell you what they think it's not. It's not opposite sex, necessarily. But they won't tell you what they think it is. But we can do the work for them.

You have two men, live together, share all the burdens and benefits of common life, in it for the long haul. Are they married on the new view? Well, it depends. What does it depend on? It depends on whether they have a sexual, emotional union. That is the distinguishing feature of a marriage on this view. And the point of marriage, as you can tell if you dig beneath the surface of any of these arguments, if you look at Justice Kennedy's opinion in the marriage case—the point of marriage, at the end of the day, is personal fulfillment. It's your own emotional fulfillment and satisfaction. So that's what marriage is: it's a deep emotional, romantic bond, and that's what it's for—your personal fulfillment.

The other view of marriage, the traditional view of marriage, what I'm going to call the conjugal view of marriage, is pretty different from that. It says it's a union not just of emotion and not just of sexual interaction in general, but of heart, mind, and body—a comprehensive union. And it's oriented not just to whatever set of activities makes you feel better, but to family life. And because of that, it has certain objective principles of permanence and exclusivity and so on. And the point of it is not just personal fulfillment. There is a deep personal fulfillment available in that kind of total union with another human being, but it has a broader and a public purpose as well, in the stability of family and through that all of the common good.

All right, so those are the two visions. In this talk, I want to give you an argument that the revisionist view gets marriage wrong. Even before you point to Genesis, even before you look at same-sex parenting studies, even before you talk about the moral status of homosexual relationships, this view just gets marriage wrong, and you can show people that using common ground with them.

The second thing I want to argue is that the conjugal view gets marriage right. It's not just what coheres with the Bible, it's what coheres with the natural law tradition of people who had no Bible—people like Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Xenophon, Musonius Rufus, Plutarch, the Stoics. These folks never had a letter from St. Paul to their hometown. They've never seen a catechism, and they had a remarkably similar vision of marriage, because it's something that corresponds to the law written on our hearts. So the revisionist view gets marriage wrong. The conjugal view gets marriage right.

The second thing is that this makes a difference to the common good. It's not just an abstract idea. It's not just a debater's point. It's not just about winning an argument. Which vision of marriage we enshrine in our law and reinforce in our culture is going to make a real difference to real people's lives, flesh-and-blood human beings, genuine human interests.

And then I want to suggest to you that sexual morality—the principles that we have not just for how we conduct our common life together in politics and in law, but even right and wrong for what we often call private behavior—sexual morality, you can make sense of it in light of this vision of marriage as a conjugal union. Once you really understand what marriage is in its essence and what it's for publicly, you can see why the moral law, and not just political or common law, should support this vision of marriage and should restrict sex to marriage so understood.

All right, so that's the project. So let's start with the first point. What's wrong with the revisionist view? The first time I was writing a draft of the book, I was trying to show it to a friend to get her feedback. And I said, now, this is the view we're going to attack, and I described the revisionist view—a union of heart and mind, fostered by sexual intimacy. And she said, actually, that sounds really good. So what's wrong with it? It has such a beautiful, superficial appeal.

Well, the first thing is that it can't explain any of the other features of marriage. It collapses marriage into companionship in general. How do you see that? Well, take something like the idea of a permanent commitment. Most people still think you have to have at least a permanent commitment to get the thing off the ground. That's one of the things that makes marriage different. But why is that? Why should it be, on this view of marriage? If marriage is really about a deep emotional bond, romantic attachment, something that might come and go itself, then why should you pledge permanence, instead of being together for as long as love lasts, where love means that romantic emotional union? If that goes away, it's inauthentic to stick with it. Now the thing that was making this a marriage is gone. It's just a friendship, on this view of marriage. Why should you have permanent commitment? Why isn't that arbitrary, just like the rule that it should be opposite sex?

The idea of exclusivity, sexual exclusivity—most people think, yeah, that's another thing that makes marriage different, is that it's sexually exclusive. That's part of what you have to commit to to get the thing off the ground at all. But again, why? If the point of marriage is your personal fulfillment, the fulfillment of your desires, why should it be sexually exclusive across the board? If by temperament or taste that's what you want, that's what makes you feel closer to your partner, then sure. But if, as many couples today are saying, they actually feel more stability and more honesty and more emotional variety in having a sexually open relationship, what does this view of marriage have to say against that? How can it explain this thing that we all, deep down, really still understand, that marriage is sexually exclusive?

Even the idea that marriage is a sexual union at all starts to look a little bit arbitrary on this view. This view basically says marriage is the max. How do you define it? It's a matter of degree, not of type of union. It's the relationship that's got the most of what makes any relationship valuable, which is shared emotional connection and experiences. But if that's true, then why should it be sexual? Of course, sex contributes to it, fosters it, can express intimacy. But it's not the only thing that can do that. Deep conversation, pursuits in difficult circumstances, pursuing your passions together—all those things can foster emotional intimacy. If that's all that sex contributes to marriage, then even the idea that marriage is sexual starts to look arbitrary. And certainly, if it doesn't have to be sexual, it doesn't have to have any inherent connection to family life or the common good. If you want to raise a kid together, that's your option; if you want to raise a dog together, that's your option. There's no basis of principle for saying that one is different from another when it comes to marriage, that one is more fitting for a marriage than the other.

So permanence, exclusivity, monogamy—the idea that marriage is two people. Why should it be two people? If it's an emotional union, three men can have a deep emotional bond. In fact, in New York magazine a couple years ago, there's a profile of one such relationship. It's called a throuple. It's a three-person couple. So it's three men, they share all the burdens and benefits of common life. They're committed to it for the long haul. They don't want to be stigmatized, they don't want their kids stigmatized, made fun of at school. They want all three names on the deed. They want to file their taxes together, they want to present to the world as one. Every single argument that the revisionist view proposes for same-sex marriage would apply to them.

So permanence, exclusivity, monogamy—or twoness—sexual union, a connection to family life, through that to the common good, a justification for being a public status at all. Every single one of the things that both sides still think makes marriage different, this view cannot explain. Can't make sense of them. Notice we haven't said anything yet about morality or the Bible or sociology or parenting or anything else. It just doesn't even make sense as a vision of what marriage is.

And that's not just a debater's point. It has consequences. Even before you get to the social consequences, it proves that if people are going to be consistent about applying the revisionist view, then it should be unjust to still expect all these other features of marriage—not just that it's opposite sex, but that it's a permanent commitment. Why not have a two- or five- or ten-year renewable license? Why isn't that the more just policy? Well, guess what? That's been proposed. A lawyer in the Washington Post made exactly that argument, and not sarcastically. The idea that it's exclusive, that it's two people—all of these things have been systematically challenged. Because if you cannot make sense of them on the new view of marriage, then they're arbitrary. They're unjust. They're bigotry. They're forms of depriving other people of their right to marriage equality.

And this is a point, again, that the most honest and clearheaded advocates have made over and over. Over 300 LGBT and allied scholars and activists a couple years ago signed a document called Beyond Marriage. They include some of my own teachers at Princeton and Yale, folks who said, of course, justice requires recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages. It also requires giving public status to deliberately temporary, sexually open, three-or-more-person, multiple-household, multiple-partner, non-sexual unions, because if love and commitment are what make a marriage, who are we to say what type of love, or what shape of commitment?

So the first thing is that most people who support the revisionist view, by their own lights, should count as purveyors of discrimination and injustice. And they can't really make sense of what we all still agree makes a marriage.

The second thing is that this makes a difference. It matters. And you can just think about it by thinking about the point that law shapes our culture and culture shapes what we do. It shapes our expectations of each other. It shapes our own internal motivations, what we think is right and proper. And what we do shapes other people's lives. It affects their interests, makes their lives go better or worse. It's the simplest idea in the world. Law shapes culture, culture shapes our behavior, and our behavior affects our life, our well-being.

But that's all you need to see to answer the most common objection to the traditional or conjugal view of marriage, which is: what difference does it make? How will it affect you or your marriage? And here's the difference. Imagine a kid from day one, growing up in a law, and therefore a culture, where the state, his school, his curriculum, his friends, the media, teach him a couple of lessons from the beginning, and he absorbs them. Number one: marriage is mainly about a deep emotional bond; when that's gone, it's inauthentic to stick with it, it's not marriage. Number two: moms and dads are perfectly replaceable; in fact, it is bigotry to think otherwise. And number three: both of these institutions, marriage and family, are mainly for the sake of your personal fulfillment.

Is that kid, when he grows up—let's say he marries a woman—is he going to be more or less likely to stick with it when the going gets tough? To stay together for the sake of the kids? Are he and his girlfriend going to be more or less likely to feel like they need to commit to marriage in the first place before having kids? Folks, the questions answer themselves. It's pretty obvious. Law shapes culture.

And one thing that everyone has agreed on is that when those things don't happen, when he's not more likely to stick with the marriage, to stick with it for the sake of the kids, everyone's interests are affected. That part is not controversial. Stability matters for family life and for the sake of the kids. Every indicator of health and well-being—educational outcomes, graduation rates, SAT scores, health outcomes in terms of psychological and physical, depression, early onset of pregnancy, disease, crime rates, literacy—every one of the interests you could care about, everything that you could think the state has some role in promoting, is affected for the worse when marriages fail or fail to form. When kids don't have a connection, wherever possible, to their own mom and dad, to a male and female role model. Where they don't have the benefit to their own identity and formation of being connected to their own flesh and blood, the man and woman whose love gave them life.

Biology, and gender, and stability—these things matter. They make a difference to children, and through children to every aspect of the common good, and they're all hurt for the worse when law and culture shape our behavior according to the revisionist view. When they tell us that marriage is mainly about a deep emotional bond, mainly about our personal fulfillment, when it undermines the stabilizing norms of permanence and exclusivity and monogamy and a connection to family life. That's what's at stake.

It's subtle. I get it. It's not a direct thing. It's not like yesterday the court redefined marriage, and today the sky is falling. But if we look at our own history, we see that this stuff really does make a difference. Some people in my generation—I'm convinced that one reason people around my age are more often than not in favor of redefining marriage is that we don't really believe that anything else is possible, that a stronger culture of marriage and family is possible. Because all we've seen in the last 15 or 20 years of our own political memory is that something around half of marriages fall apart, that most people have to deal with some kind of deep fragmentation of their family life at some point.

But it wasn't always so. There was a time when law and culture supported a different vision. Right after the war, the portion of children who grew up without a connection to their married mom and dad for life was in the single digits, less than 10%. Today, across the board, it's over 40%. In some communities, poor and minority communities in particular, they're hit the hardest; it's over 70%. In between, we had the sexual revolution. We had no-fault divorce, which, when it was proposed, the argument was: it's not going to affect you or your marriage. How could it? How could it, whether John and Susie down the road have an easier time getting a divorce they were going to have anyway? How could that affect you or anybody else? They're going to have the divorce anyway, because they have a high-conflict marriage. This just clears the obstacles, just makes it easier. It's not going to make anybody else get one who wasn't going to.

Decades later, the data are in, and that was just a mistake. It didn't just make it easier to get out of a marriage you were going to end anyway. It made people more likely to keep their eye on the exit ramp. And guess what? That makes them more likely to take it. Law shaped culture, and culture shaped behavior.

And in that case, again, at the beginning, the argument was, well, who cares? What kids need is a loving parent. Today, everybody says, well, they need two houses and two parents and two sources of love and income. But during that debate, it wasn't, oh no, they just need some source of love. And isn't it better if they have a low-conflict home in the first place? And again, the data are in, and that was a mistake. It turns out that it is an uphill battle. It's not impossible, but it is an uphill battle to bring a kid up as a single parent and to give them everything that they need. So no-fault divorce is an example that law shapes culture, which shapes our behavior, which shapes real flesh-and-blood human beings, how well or poorly their lives go.

I think it also shapes another—it really affects our culture across the board. And another thing that the revisionist view of marriage hurts—it's not just kids' interests, it's also the interests of single people. Now, that might sound like a surprising thing. Most people think that, well, we have to support the revisionist view of marriage because marriage is the answer to loneliness, right? That's what Justice Kennedy said in his opinion. He said it's the institution that responds to the fear that you might call out only to find no one there.

But I actually think that the revisionist view makes loneliness worse. Why? Because it tells everybody that you have to put all your emotional eggs in the marriage basket. That's what makes marriage different in the first place: it's just your number one emotional bond. That's what one of my critics says. If it's your number one emotional bond, that means there's marriage and sex and intimacy over here—true connection to another human being—and then over here, there's everything else. There's your drinking buddies, there's your coworkers, you gossip around the water cooler, but that's about it. Anything more would be an imposition. It would be clingy. It would be too much. This vision of marriage just reinforces that terrible dichotomy, which puts an emotional strain on marriages. It says, you've got to get every emotional need met out of your marriage. It puts a kind of ego spin on marriage. It says it's for your emotional needs. And it makes it worse for people who, for whatever reason, are not going to be married. It makes it harder for them to find real intimacy outside of a sexual or marital relationship.

So I think it hurts our culture of friendship. Anthony Esolen has written beautifully about this in Christianity Today, I think—maybe it was Touchstone magazine—in a piece called A Requiem for Friendship. And he said this vision of sex hurts friendship. There he focuses on male friendship, but he said the same thing could apply to women. You have to distance yourself from the possibility that this is a marital or sexual thing, and that ends up meaning you have to go emotionally shallow.

So it has deep and ramifying consequences. And we talk about this in the book, What Is Marriage? My coauthor, Ryan, in his newer book, talks about this in Truth Overruled, which is a response to the marriage cases.

All right, so you might say, maybe I'm with you so far. It's not just about equality, it's not just about tradition, it's not just about homosexuality; it's about these two visions of marriage. And maybe you're right that the revisionist view gets marriage wrong and we can show that. We don't have to point to the Bible; even before we get there, we can show people it just doesn't make sense of marriage. It collapses marriage into companionship. And maybe I can even see that, yeah, this stuff has consequences. It's had consequences for the last several decades, and doubling down on this vision of marriage, teaching kids that fathers are optional, is going to make it harder to reinforce the idea that they're essential. It's going to make it worse for the next generation. Maybe you can agree with all of that.

Then the question is, well, what's the alternative vision? What vision makes sense of marriage as we've come to understand it in the West, and really in other parts of the world, for millennia? And in the book, we call it the conjugal view of marriage, or we talk about it as: marriage is a comprehensive union. So if the revisionist view says marriage is your number one bond, it's your soul mate, it's a deep emotional union, this view says it's a comprehensive union.

What does that mean? Well, we can take a step back for a second and just think about any kind of community. Any kind of union at all involves cooperation. That's what makes human beings form a unit: common action toward common ends, in the context of a commitment. You've got a university. A university has the common action, the thing that makes it a university, that forges the bond of a university, at least when it all goes well—activities like teaching and learning and studying and research and publication. Why? Because the common ends of a university are knowledge, truth, understanding. And in light of both of those things, in light of that set of common ends, realized by that set of common actions, university life calls for a certain kind of commitment. It calls for commitments that promote those common ends and that protect them: commitments of academic integrity, not plagiarizing, being honest and open, publishing all your research findings even when they're inconvenient, and so on.

That's the basic structure of any kind of community. This is a full-throated vision, across the board, of community in general. And what makes the community of marriage, on this view? If that's what makes the community of an academic life, what makes the community of marriage? On this view, what makes the community of marriage is that in those three dimensions, it's comprehensive. So let's take that step by step.

What's the first dimension? It's comprehensive in the dimensions of the partners united in its common action. This is just a fancy way of saying that marital love seeks total union with the beloved—heart, mind, and body. That's what romance seeks. That's what it tends toward. That's what it wants as its fulfillment. Most people will agree with you on that. They'll think about it for a second: yeah, that's right, that's kind of what makes it different from other forms of friendship. It's a union of heart, mind, and body, not just heart and mind. And most people will agree with you that the bodily part has something to do with sex. Yeah, that sounds right. That's part of why sex is integral to marriage.

All right, so then the question is, why? How does sex make bodily union? At this point, the revisionist is going to say, because it makes you feel really close, basically—something synonymous with that. It's a way of expressing and fostering affection. But we've already seen that doesn't work. That can't explain it. That's just another emotional union. That's something that other things besides sex can do. If sex is integral because you want a union of heart, mind, and body, total union with the beloved, you have to have another account of how sexual union can make for bodily union—or, in the Genesis language, one-flesh union.

So what is that account? Here's one way of looking at it. You start in the simpler case. What makes for one flesh in a single person? What makes my heart and my lungs and so on all one body? It's that they're all working together toward a single bodily end—my survival. That's what makes them all one flesh. And that radical kind of bodily union is possible between two people, but just in one case. It's only in what our law, as well as our religion, has long called the marital act that a man and a woman themselves are coordinated toward a single bodily end of the whole that they make up. They become one flesh in the same way that the parts of a single person are one flesh, working together toward a single bodily end that contains and encompasses, but goes beyond, both of them. So it makes possible a bodily union, and for that reason a union of heart, mind, and body, total union with the beloved, comprehensive in the dimensions of the partners united.

All right, fine. So it's comprehensive in that first sense. What about the sense of common ends, right? The common ends that it's oriented toward? And again, we have this sense: the different types of community are defined by different types of purposes, right? The academic community is about the purposes of knowledge and understanding. A sports community, a team, is about—I was never very good at this—athletic excellence. I'm about as athletic as you think I am, basically. So it's always a struggle. So they're defined by manifesting athletic skill, maybe getting a good workout, whatever it is that they do. But most people get that marriage is a little different. It's not just about intellectual pursuits, not just about recreational pursuits, but somehow it's about all of these things. That's why it calls for living with the person. You'll get agreement on that.

And most people think the reason for that, the reason it's oriented not just to this or that human good but to all of them, is because it's oriented to whole new human beings—new subjects, new participants in every one of those goods. Family life. Yeah, most people will agree with that. It sounds right. But again, what explains that? And here's again where the two views divide. The revisionists would have to say, well, it's because two people have decided to join together, to band together, to rear a kid. But again, if that were true, you wouldn't be able to explain any other feature of marriage. Why does it have to have a connection to romance? Why does it have to be two people? Any grouping of adults can decide to band together to raise a kid. What makes the connection between family life and romance in marriage?

But here again, the conjugal view comes in, comes to the rescue, and can explain the connection. The very act that makes marital love, on this view, is the kind of act that makes new life. So marriage itself, the relationship embodied by that act, is by its nature—not just by choice—oriented to family life. And through family life, to every kind of pursuit, intellectual and recreational and otherwise. So it's because marriage is embodied in the life-giving act, the very lovemaking act is the life-giving act, that marriage itself points to and is always extended and deepened by family life. And it points to it by its own nature, not just because this or that couple happens to want to raise kids together.

And the last thing is, if it's comprehensive in those two senses—comprehensive in this kind of vertical sense, the dimensions of the partners united, and in this horizontal sense, oriented to whole new human beings and to every cooperation in every department of life—if it makes them one flesh in the marital act and literally one flesh in children, then it ought to call for a comprehensive commitment. You have a comprehensive union, you've got to have a comprehensive commitment. What does comprehensive commitment mean? Well, through time, it just means permanence. And at each time, at any given time, it means exclusivity.

So you see what we've done there. Permanence and exclusivity and sexual union and a connection to family life by its nature, and through that to the common good—every single one of the things that the revisionist view could not explain, this view makes sense of and unifies in a way that people can understand, even if they haven't read Genesis. We've just unpacked what in Genesis is called one-flesh union, but in these other traditions goes by other names—something that our common human reason can understand: that a man and a woman, and only a man and a woman, can together become one flesh, united at all levels of their being, which therefore points them to the natural fulfillment of that union in family life, and for both of those reasons calls for a total commitment. If you're going to have total union, you need total commitment. That's it. That's the conjugal view.

For centuries, it went by the name of common sense. If you asked somebody to explain why marriage was a man and a woman, it would have been like saying, why does marriage have to involve people? The question just wouldn't have registered. We're in a time and a place where we have to go to the bedrock.

One of the very nice points that Ryan Anderson makes in his book Truth Overruled is that every age of the life of the church brings up new challenges. And so things that went unsaid because they were just taken for granted have to be clarified and defined. In the very early church, that was the nature of Christ, the nature of the Trinity. People would say Christ was just a man, or Christ was just God with a human costume, and the church would have to come in and say, no, and no—fully man and fully divine. People would come in with different theories about how the Trinity was really just one thing but with different faces, or they were just three, and the church would say, no, and no—three persons, one God. Today, in our own time, we have the privilege of explaining and defending and articulating a different thing, which is the nature of marriage and family and even the human person. And that's what we've just discussed.

And you can see how, if you embody this vision in the law, it's going to reinforce all of the things that the revisionist view undermines. It's going to reinforce that this is a kind of relationship that calls for total commitment, that it ought to outlast even the feelings, the ups and downs of romance, that it's oriented more to the needs of children than to the desires of adults, that in entering it, you're not just seeking personal fulfillment, you're not even just making a promise to one other person—you're making a promise to the community, because when your own marriage fails or when your own kids suffer, everybody has to foot the bill. All of these things, these stabilizing norms that really help the common good—this vision of marriage, the more it's upheld, the more it'll reinforce the idea that kids need both their mom and their dad, that they deserve, wherever they can get it, a connection to their own mom and dad, flesh of their flesh.

But it doesn't just do that. It doesn't just explain why this is good policy. I think it also explains why the church's sexual ethic is what it is. And this is another part where it can get heavy going, because it's something that the church has had the luxury of taking for granted, of not having to sit down and spell out. But we're going to try to spell it out here.

And I think there are a couple of ways of seeing it. Once you have this vision of marriage in mind—the conjugal view, total union, comprehensive union with the beloved—first, you can think about premarital sex. What does that involve? That involves a bodily union without a full personal union. It involves the union as one flesh without the commitment that we just saw one-flesh union calls for. Total union without total commitment. Using the body without fully respecting the whole person. So it involves depersonalizing the other, instrumentalizing them. You want to get something out of a part of them without committing to the whole of them. You're using their body as if it weren't really a part of a whole person to bring in tow, to commit to.

And in fact, you can see hints of this when St. Paul talks about sexual immorality. He says other kinds of sins are outside the body; sexual immorality is a sin against the body. For this reason, and he points to the fact that it's a one-flesh union, so it calls for a total commitment. When he talks about prostitutes, he says, you know—all right, I have to confess, I'm a Catholic, so I only paraphrase the Bible, okay? I missed these camps where you go and you memorize John 16:33 or whatever. So, I'm sure it's in there. And I actually looked it up on the Wi-Fi; it's in 1 Corinthians 6. So I can tell you where. But he says, do you not know that a man becomes one flesh? He's saying, when you have one-flesh union in the body, it calls for a total union in heart and mind. And that's what any kind of premarital sex lacks. It divides the person. It tries to use one part of them without the whole of them.

John Paul II puts this in a slightly different way, in a very nice set of teachings that goes now by the name of the theology of the body. It's been used in a lot of marriage prep in Catholic communities, but increasingly, I think, non-Catholic. It's a really beautiful and rich vision of marriage and sex, deeply rooted in the Bible. And what he says there is that premarital or non-marital sex of any kind involves lying with the body. Your body is saying one thing, your heart is saying another. The body is saying total union, like we just saw—I give myself to you completely. And the heart is saying, but I'm holding something back, something less than total commitment is all I can give you. It involves a lie with the body, a divide within the person, between their heart and mind on the one hand and their body on the other.

And like any kind of lie, it has consequences. The more you lie, the more you're willing to use your speech for things other than truth-telling, the less reliable you'll be, the less meaningful your speech will be. The same thing is true in the sexual realm. The more you're willing to use your body for something other than total commitment, the less you'll be able to use it to express that. The more you're willing to use sex to mean anything, the less meaningful it will be. You hurt your own capacity for total union every time you're willing to use sex for anything else. That's another way of seeing it, and it motivates people to see that they're not just breaking some rule that God just imposed. He could have given us another rule; this is the one He picked, right? You're really hurting your own good, your own capacity for the very thing that you want in romance, which is total union. You're making it harder for yourself to realize that.

So it's use, it's dividing the person, it's a division within, it's a kind of failure of integrity, of having all the parts hang together—heart, mind, and body. And it weakens your capacity for marriage in the way that lying weakens your capacity for community, for true communication.

What about, if that's sex without the commitment—what about sex without the bodily union? Which is, of course, the issue of the day in the most recent form of the marriage debate that's been going on for decades: sexual union, for example, between two men or between two women. A lot of people think that the church's ethic on this is basically an ethic of being against love. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. We practically invented love. God is love. There is nothing wrong with two men or two women loving each other. In fact, Christianity was the revolutionary view that everyone is called to love even their enemies, called to love everyone. So the problem is not love.

The problem is that true love has to match the truth about lover and beloved. True love has to conform itself to the facts, to reality. It has to take the beloved where he or she is, has to respect the kind of union that they can have or not have. And the fact is that two men or two women cannot have true bodily union. We just saw it: it means coordination toward a single bodily end of the whole. There's no single bodily end that two men or two women or any other grouping can coordinate toward.

So the problem is not that their love is dirty. It's that their love is holy, and that's why it's wrong to make it something it isn't. That's why it's wrong—not to commit to helping each other, to making sacrifices for each other, to giving each other advice, to being each other's go-to person, being the person that knows what time your plane is landing, the person that everyone goes to when they say, you know, he's not been himself lately, is he okay? Nothing is wrong with companionship, or the love that makes sacrifices. The problem is in trying to make that love into something it isn't, trying to express it in a form of union that isn't really possible, that doesn't respect the truth about the body of the beloved.

You try for one-flesh union where it's not possible, you're misshaping the love you do have, and the kind of union you can have. You're dishonoring the thing that really is there. It's not honoring the truth about their bodies. And it's not honoring the truth about marriage. It's trying to seek the image of marriage, the feeling, the experience of one-flesh union. And after all, that's what makes sexual pleasure so enticing at its best, when it's not just a kind of bodily release, when it's at its most romantic. What is it seeking? Total union, the experience of total union with the beloved. But where there isn't the reality of total union, you're just seeking the image over the substance. You're seeking an imitation of a different kind of love, rather than deepening the kind of love that is available to you.

That's why love is good between two men or two women, as it is between any people, but trying to sexualize that love disserves it. It can't really deepen or extend or reflect it. It can't match the truth about lover and beloved. And in that respect, it's not as true a love as it can be.

So on the one hand, premarital sex, sex without commitment, seeks a union with the body without a union with the rest of the person. And non-unitive sex, between two men or between two women or otherwise, seeks the image of bodily union without the full reality of it. Both, for that reason, disserve true love. They disserve the person. They involve a use of the person rather than a full union of heart, mind, and body. What's missing from the premarital sex case? The commitment part of the full union—total union and commitment. What's missing from the same-sex case? It's the total union of heart and mind and body. It has the image of that without the full reality of it.

Either way, you're seeking the image of total union with the beloved without the full reality, and that's why it's wrong. But it's not just wrong because it disserves the love that these two people can and should foster, because it distorts it, because it makes it something it isn't, because it seeks the image of a different kind of love instead of deepening the reality of the love that they have. It's also wrong because it has consequences beyond them. And again, our vision of marriage and family that we've just sketched makes it clear why that is.

The more people are willing to use sex as something other than an expression of total commitment, the harder it'll be to keep together all the very fragile unities that marriage preserves: of kids with their parents, of mothers with fathers, of sex with love and total commitment. These are things that are always threatening to come apart at the seams in any culture. They're very, very hard to keep together. Marriage is the public institution that keeps them together, and sexual ethics is the set of norms for private behavior that keeps them together. Both of these things serve true love, and they also serve the common good. And when you hurt one of them, you're going to hurt the other.

So marriage, from a personal perspective, is total union with the beloved, and sexual immorality always involves seeking the feeling of that without the full thing. It's either missing the commitment part or missing the bodily union part. But from the public perspective, marriage is about linking men and women together as husbands and wives to be fathers and mothers to any kids they have. It's about making sure that kids get the best shot at being reared by their own mom and dad. And from that public perspective, sexual immorality always undermines that. It always threatens to undermine the stability of these things together: men and women, mothers and fathers, parents with their kids, sex with true love and commitment.

So whether you look at it from the personal perspective, the private perspective, or from the public; whether you look at it from the theological tradition about one-flesh union or the philosophical, the natural law tradition; whether you look at it from the perspective of keeping our love in conformity to the truth about lover and beloved—not lying with the body, not seeking the image of marriage over the reality—or from the more mundane policy perspective of keeping kids together with their parents, of stabilizing the very, very unstable forces of sexual desire, for the sake of family—both these public and private, theological and philosophical traditions converge on the vision of marriage that you get in Genesis, that our Lord confirms when he's challenged on marriage and he says, from the beginning it was not so. And it's the vision that, for that reason, we have not just reason to promote in our communities, to catechize our kids into, but some very, very strong reasons in social justice to promote wherever we can for the rest of society. Thanks.

We have a few minutes for some questions, which have been coming in, and so here are a couple of them. We won't get to all of them. That's all right.

First of all: do revisionists still recognize the importance of lifelong marriage, especially with the prevalence of no-fault divorce? Yeah, it's interesting. I think, certainly at the level of policy, they don't, though they haven't fully doubled down on that. They haven't fully gone with the five-year renewable license proposal that some people are pushing. But I think the reason you can use this point still, to get them to see that they might need a different vision of marriage in the background, is that they still think it should aspire to permanence. Most rank-and-file people think, yeah, it's better when a marriage lasts for life, but their own vision of marriage can't explain that, and so you can use that point.

Another question, regarding contraception. Is that in the same line as homosexual sex? Wow. I think so. I think so. It's not as blatant. It's not as direct. Obviously, a man and a woman who are committed together for life, who are open to life at some point in their marriage, they're not putting the lie to this vision of marriage in the same way. So that's certainly to be kept in mind. And they're not undermining the idea that kids need a mom and a dad. They're not undermining the idea that marriage is more than an emotional union.

But I do think that it's not just the marriage as a whole, but every act of marital love that needs to be speaking the full truth with the body, a total gift of self. I think contraception is a limitation on that. It's a holding part of yourself back. Premarital sex holds a different part of yourself back, the total commitment. Contracepted sex holds a very important part of yourself back, which is your fertility—the danger and the peril and the risk and the adventure and the romance of the possibility of family life, a new child, a new human being from this act.

That doesn't mean that you have to have as many kids as possible. In every tradition that has some moral qualms about contraception, there's nothing wrong with abstaining for different periods where you have to, to make sure that you can meet financial needs or whatever else. But even there, the analogy to lying with the body, I think, helps us. There's a big difference between staying silent because someone shouldn't find out a certain thing, and lying to them. One is just avoiding a certain kind of conveying of the truth; the other is thwarting it. Same thing, I think, in marriage. Every time that the man and woman embrace, they're giving themselves completely to each other at that moment. They're not holding anything back. There's no single act where you can say the thing that made that a one-flesh union, they were trying to pull back—the orientation toward family life. And yet, at the same time, there were some nights where they just watched a movie instead, because uniting would have had other consequences. So I do think that keeping each act a complete expression of marital love does depend on not holding back a very important part. Thank you.

This is just in. Since your talk is titled a reasoned defense, how do we as a church speak to a culture that seems to have no interest in reason, logic, or the evidence of natural law? And in fact, isn't one of the marks of our millennial culture the rejection of this thing? Great. Well, in a way, that's what all of the second talk is about, so I don't want to steal my own thunder, but I will just say this. Yes and no. Yes, the culture doesn't seem to show very much interest in reason or arguments, but on the other hand, it's not like—I mean, 30 years ago, the problem would have been moral relativism. It would have been like, ah, you think there are these rules that are just true for everybody, principles objectively true about right and wrong, about human goods and bads, marriage and family—but there's just your truth and my truth. That would have been a very different problem.

Today, people are all too happy to tell you what they think morality and justice require. So they're not relativists, but on the other hand, you can work with that. That gives you something to use, that gives you an in. You can say, okay, you think justice requires marriage equality, no arbitrary restrictions, and you think saying sex is arbitrary. So let me just ask you: forget about my view, forget about a reasoned defense of it, why do you think marriage has to be two? You should actually try this sometime. It's a lot of fun, okay? People say, well, I mean, that's just—it's nature. Or, well, it's just, it's always been so. Is that right? Do you hear yourself? So you can take advantage of people's moral vehemence, self-righteousness in some cases, and use it. You can work with it. You can say, all right, you care about reasons and arguments because you think justice has to be served. Well, what about this reason? What about that argument?

The second section in your outline, that the revisionist view gets marriage wrong—doesn't that kind of beg the question for many people? Don't many people now actually question these four points, commitments to permanence and so forth? And why should they listen to our argument when we don't even share a common vision of marriage? Yeah, so I think here you have to just draw some distinctions. The very movement leaders of the push for same-sex marriage often know that they're not just going to stop here. They're not interested mainly in recognizing same-sex relationships as married.

Actually, you can think about the evolution of the debate as a whole. It's really remarkable. Fifteen years ago, the argument was: forget about marriage, we just need hospital visitation and inheritance rights. That was it, just these two little things. Then it was, okay, well, we also need these other concrete benefits. It's not a marriage that's different; we'll call it a civil union. That lasted for about five seconds in public life, right? Now it's, well, we need recognition on exactly the same terms, because love and commitment are what make a marriage. And already there, the premise is in place for other changes: love and commitment, who are you to say—this kind of love, two-person love, and so on. So the leadership has always had a much longer game in view. Many of them really believe deep down that all of the stabilizing norms of marriage, like the ones I listed, are oppressive. They're holdovers from patriarchy and injustice and class struggle and so on.

But most rank-and-file people are not with them. Most of the people you'll encounter in your congregations, in your family and friends, really just want their friends not to be lonely. They think, yeah, marriage is about your soul mate, and obviously a man can have a male soul mate and a woman can have a female one. And so they still believe in these other ideals. And so it's worth, with them, drawing on those.

Now, with the leadership, you can point to something else. You can say, okay, well, if you really think marriage should have no particular shape at all, why are we recognizing it? If you think any line is arbitrary, why draw a line at all? Why is this a policy argument for you? So you can really use their radical view, and the fact that they won't even respond to any of these problems, by posing to them a much bigger challenge, a much more holistic challenge. It's like, why should this be a policy thing at all? And if they say you're right, it shouldn't, we should get out of the marriage business and so on, then you say, okay, well, what about all the effects of that? If the state gets out of marriage at the front end, in terms of just a non-coercive way of encouraging this kind of vision, a set of ideals, aspirations—permanence and exclusivity, a mom and a dad, biological connection, and so on—if it gets out of it at that end, it's only going to get much more heavily invested on the other end. When marriages fail, when there are custody battles, when there are kids who have been deprived of the best department of health and education and welfare, which is their married mom and dad, and where the state will then have to go in to meet their needs in a bigger way. So those who think that we should just get the state out of marriage entirely—it's a self-defeating proposal. Try to get the state extricated from this end, and it's going to have to get more entangled and more involved and messier and bigger and less efficient on the other end.

Very briefly, just a quick follow-up to the exact same issue: do revisionists agree with the negative social impacts on the culture? So would this be a reason for pushing a greater growth of the state? Yeah, I think some of them do just think that we need the state to grow so that it can change the culture, and in particular change social norms, and in particular change religious norms. They see the church as the main obstacle to the prevalence of their vision of a good society. And that's something that needs to be named. Call that spade what it is and fight it head on.

But most rank-and-file people still do care about things like health and education and welfare, and whether a kid grows up in poverty. And if you can show them the links to the marriage issue—like being raised by your own mom and dad in a committed bond for life means that you have less than a 2% chance of growing up in poverty—imagine if we made that the norm across society. Those are arguments they will still respond to.