Making the Case for Man-Woman Marriage

Transcript (edited for readability).

It's my privilege to introduce to you now our first speaker. Dr. Ryan T. Anderson is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He's the founding editor of Public Discourse. He wrote the book When Harry Became Sally, which is actually a pretty gentle, kind, thoughtful book, which I think is the reason it got banned. If it were a nasty diatribe, I think they would have just ignored it. But Amazon, wanting to increase the sales of your book, banned it. And he also wrote Truth Overruled. There are several other things he's written; you can read his bio in our folder. These two books, When Harry Became Sally and Truth Overruled, are both available for purchase in the back, along with John Kleinig's book, Wonderfully Made. It's a theology of the body by John Kleinig, who spoke here three years ago. I think you're going to want all three of these books.

Anyway, Dr. Anderson did his undergrad at Princeton in music. Is that right? How fun is that? So what did you think of the singing? Are they okay with it? And the organ playing was delightful. Thank you. Thank you, Jacqueline. And he got his PhD in political philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, which is where I think most of the Fort Wayne Seminary faculty also went for their doctorates. He's been everywhere on all kinds of media. You've seen him there and enjoyed him. He is recognized as a teaching fellow and just an accomplished academician and insightful thinker in the chaos of our current time. Delightfully, he now lives on a farm. So that's why he had to come to Iowa. And he and his wife, Anna, have two baptized children, right? And one on the way. And this is one of the requirements of speakers for us at this conference: you must — our main speakers have to have babies due in February. So you and Dr. Woodford both have children due; his is number seven. You've got some catching up to do. Please welcome with me, Dr. Ryan Anderson.

Thank you. Great. Thank you. It is a pleasure to be with you. It almost feels like I'm in the Catholic Church, I have to be honest. All right, I'm not going to go there because I don't want to get kicked out too soon. But I mean, you guys dress like Catholics, you sing — I feel right at home. So I appreciate it.

I will say, though, since it was mentioned that I was a music major as an undergraduate, I wrote my senior thesis on Catholic liturgical music in the 20th century, and the title could have been "What the Heck Happened," because it is just really a shame. Whereas you have this two-thousand-year tradition of beautiful music, and then in the 20th century, it's like the Second Vatican Council happens and we get rid of all of it. So it's frustrating as a Catholic. But I'm very glad to be welcomed here to be speaking this morning with you.

And I'm also particularly glad for the topics that were kind of assigned to me. A lot of people want to avoid these topics, especially this first one on marriage. They're like, "Wow, the Supreme Court settled the issue. Let's just get with the times. Why do we want to be talking about that? This is a losing issue. We want to talk about winning issues." That's not the role of the church, right? The role of the church is to bear witness to the truth. It's to bear witness to the truth using all of the disciplines that can reveal the truth. That means we're going to have theological defenses; we're also going to have philosophical, social science, medicinal, et cetera, et cetera. All of the various disciplines of both faith and reason will point to the same truth, because there's no contradiction, right? Faith and reason don't contradict each other. Science, when it's done well; social science, when it's done well; medicine, when it's done well, will confirm what the Bible reveals, because God's not schizophrenic. So he's not going to write one thing in the scripture and another thing in nature, which should be understood as creation. The creational norms and biblical norms will go hand in hand if you're doing both well, right?

And so I am not a theologian. I'm not a biblical scholar, so I'm going to leave that to the people in the church who are theologians and biblical scholars. I'm trained in philosophy, and that's where I'm going to be looking at these questions, trying to equip you to be able to speak to people who might not share your theological convictions, might not share some of our starting points in the scriptures, but we can still show them that what has been revealed in scripture is true. Anyway, so that's where I'm coming from. That's why I'm glad that we're engaged in this.

I think it's going to be particularly important with some of the religious liberty discussions. And just to highlight this, ask yourself how the religious liberty discussions played for the racists — those churches who had distorted scriptures, who had distorted the sound theology of marriage to say that interracial marriage was contrary to their church doctrines. Those churches and those schools, those religious communities, they did not win their religious liberty legal battles. Bob Jones University lost resoundingly at the Supreme Court. And so now the question's going to be, what's going to happen to not just the baker, the florist, and the photographer, not just the adoption agencies, but all of the classical schools? I think of all the various classical academies within the Christian tradition who want to hold to the truth about marriage — the universities, all the various charities, hospitals — whether it's on the marriage issue or, as we'll get to in the next session, some of the transgender issues. If the left succeeds in defining those underlying anthropological claims as bigotry, then they're going to treat the religious liberty arguments in the same way that they treat the religious liberty arguments of bigots. And so a lot hinges on how well we are able to defend those underlying convictions.

And they come right from today's first reading from morning prayer in the book of Genesis, right? That we're made in the image and likeness of God — that's what the abortion debate and the euthanasia debate is all about at its core. That we're created male and female — that's what the transgender debate is all about at its core. And then that male and female are created for each other — and that's what this first session is all about.

Okay, so let me just start by saying that I co-authored a book about a decade ago with a classmate of mine from Princeton, titled What is Marriage?, and then the subtitle was Man and Woman: A Defense, where we wanted to put our cards on the table, where we were coming from on this. The reason that we titled it What is Marriage? is that we thought the other side was kind of stealing a base in this discussion. They were saying, "Look, we're in favor of marriage equality. We're in favor of marriage equality." And my response was, look, we're all in favor of marriage equality. We all want the law and public policy, and for that matter, the church — we all want all of those institutions to treat all marriages equally. What we disagree about is what type of consenting adult relationship is marital. That's what the real disagreement was about. It wasn't about equality, it wasn't about justice, it was about the very nature of marriage.

And some people said that the very nature of marriage was that it was the consenting adult union of any two individuals, or maybe more, right? We're going to see this in about half an hour, that they're going to continue this argument. Other people said, no, the very nature of marriage is that it's a sexually complementary union, that it's a union of man and woman, husband and wife, mother and father. And those are two different visions of marriage.

As we were researching the book, we found that people in favor of what they called marriage equality actually had a vision of marriage that made it collapse into companionship. There was a philosophy professor at Wayne State University, John Corvino, who said marriage is the relationship with your, quote, "number one person." And what set marriage apart from other relationships was the degree of intensity. It had what other relationships had, but it just had more of it. It had it to the greatest extent, right? Your other relationships might have been your number two, three, and four people, but marriage was your number one person. And so this was the argument.

And what we saw when we looked at this vision of marriage — that it's really about an intense emotional, romantic relationship — is that it couldn't explain or account for any of the historic marital norms that we recognized both in canon law and in civil law, right? Both the church and the state had held for two millennia that marriage was monogamous, exclusive, and permanent. But this vision of marriage couldn't explain any of those things. If marriage is an intense emotional union, well, your emotions come and they go, they wax and then they wane. Why should marriage be permanent? Why do you make a permanent commitment if it's simply about an emotional romantic connection? You can fall in love with someone. You can fall out of love with someone.

Likewise, why would an intense emotional, romantic relationship need to be monogamous? Two people can fall in love, but so too can three people or four people. You can fall in love with more people. Why would it need to be sexually exclusive, right? When we think about the exclusivity that marriage calls for, it's sexual exclusivity. But if marriage is about an intense emotional union, some people might find that non-marital sexual relationships enhance their emotional connection with their spouse, right? This is what swinging is all about. And so you could see, to a certain extent, that once you buy into this vision of marriage, monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence can't be explained. There's no foundation for them.

But then likewise, you couldn't explain why government's in the marriage business. If marriage is just about the consenting adult romantic lives of citizens, then why do you want to put the government in more people's bedrooms? The left had been arguing, "Get the state out of my bedroom." And yet when they were redefining marriage, they actually said, "We want to put government in more people's bedrooms." This explanation of what marriage is, where it's just companionship, emotional and romantic connection, can't explain why we have state recognition and regulation of marriage. We don't have the government in the baptism business or in the bar mitzvah business. Why is it in the marriage business? Unless marriage is also a natural ordinance and not just a supernatural ordinance, right? It's both. From a Catholic perspective, it's both a natural institution and a supernatural sacrament, right? It does double duty here. It's both a civic institution and a sacred institution. Well, the revisionists couldn't really explain how it's a natural creational institution, right? And this is why non-Christians should be married, should stay married, et cetera, et cetera. Marriage isn't just for the church.

All right, all of that said, it's not exclusive to gay marriage. The vast majority of Westerners, the vast majority of Americans, have bought into this vision of marriage. Heterosexuals have bought into this vision of marriage, because this is the vision of human sexuality that came out of the 1960s, that came out of the sexual revolution, right? It's the vision of human sexuality that says consenting adults should do sexually whatever consenting adults want to do. This is how we got the hookup culture. It's how we got the introduction of no-fault divorce laws. Why should it be permanent? Why not have it be temporary? This is how we got the rise of cohabitation. This is how we got the rise of nonmarital childbearing. Fifty years ago, it was 5% of children were born outside of marriage. Today, 40%, right? It was heterosexuals who didn't take monogamy or exclusivity or permanence seriously. And then fifty years later, we were at a place culturally that Anthony Kennedy and the four other liberals on the court could say, "Well, then why should we take sexual complementarity seriously either?"

These things stand or fall together. Monogamy, exclusivity, permanence, and sexual complementarity — they're either going to rise or they're going to fall together. The problem here is that what the Supreme Court did was it went to the logical conclusion of a bad train of logic. The sexual revolution, and the logic that was built into the sexual revolution, has not been good for human dignity or human flourishing, right? The weakening of monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence has left two generations now of children growing up without fathers. But before we even get to that, we should mention children being conceived outside of marriage and therefore frequently aborted. The sexual revolution and the abortion holocaust also go hand in hand. As you have the rise of non-marital sexual activity, you have the rise of non-marital pregnancies, you have the increase in the rates of children being killed in the womb, you have the increase of children being raised without their fathers, you have the increase of women who are being used and abused as sex objects, right? This has been an utter disaster for human dignity and human flourishing.

And what Kennedy did was he just enshrined it into our constitutional law. He just elevated that philosophy, that vision of human sexuality and of the family, into the Fourteenth Amendment. And so it was a cause — the legal redefinition of marriage was a consequence of a cultural redefinition, but now it will be a catalyst. And what I mean by that is that it's going to accelerate many of those negative trends. And you're already seeing it, and I will say more about that in a minute.

But okay, so enough bad news. I can see faces that were smiling when we started are now sufficiently depressed. Let me give you the alternative vision, right? If that's a bad vision of what marriage is, where it's your number one person, it's about an intense emotional romantic connection where it could be two people or more, it could be temporary or permanent, it could be exclusive or open, it could be open to life or not open to life — let me give you an alternative philosophy of what marriage is. And hopefully it's complementary to your theology of marriage.

What Robby George, the Princeton professor that I mentioned, Sherif Girgis, my Princeton classmate, who's now a professor at Notre Dame Law School — what we set out to do was to think about this from kind of a natural law perspective, thinking about what's the nature of an institution. And so we took a lesson from Aristotle. Aristotle says you can analyze any community by looking at three aspects of a community. Look at the actions that the community performs, look at the goods that the community seeks, and then look at the norms, the commitments that govern the community's life.

And since it's the beginning of the academic year, let's take an academic community and let's apply this theory there. There are certain academic actions. Professors will be giving lectures while students attend lectures and take notes. Professors are conducting research. They're going to the libraries, they're writing their books, they're writing their articles, and then the students are going to read those books, read those articles. Professors are going to administer exams, students are going to take exams, they're going to discuss the answers during office hours, et cetera, et cetera. Those are all of the actions that make up the bread and butter of an academic community. Tailgates, football games, fundraisers — those are kind of nice additions. But if all you did in your four years of college was tailgate and go to football games, and then when you graduate, give money to your alma mater, you didn't actually go to a university. And unfortunately, many of our universities are becoming more like fundraising machines with football teams than they are schools that educate and form people. But that's academic action.

All right. What are all those actions ordered towards? What are they oriented towards? What are they directed towards? They're directed towards the good of knowledge of the truth. The whole purpose of education is to discover the truth, to conform yourself to the truth, right? And that's why all the various things that you do in seminary formation, all the various things you do in university formation, all the things that you do K through 12, right — it's to help your children discover the truth, to know the truth, right? And so our actions are ordered towards a particular good.

And then that explains the various norms of the community, the commitments. So think about things like both academic freedom and academic integrity. Think about honor codes, think about various forms of "you can't cheat on your test," "you can't plagiarize your paper," "you can't manufacture your data," right? To be a good scholar, to engage in good scholarship, you're supposed to cite all of your sources. You're not supposed to plagiarize. You're supposed to have the freedom to explore difficult questions, but also the responsibility to not be cooking the books. Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand on this understanding. And the reason why is that those are the norms, those are the commitments, that will help your actions achieve the goal, right? It's kind of built into the cake.

All right, so now let's apply this to the marital community. What we argue is that marriage is a comprehensive union. It's a comprehensive relationship. It's different in kind, not just degree, from other human relationships. And so what we meant by this is that marriage is comprehensive in the act that unites spouses, it's comprehensive with the good that the spouses are ordered towards, and then it's comprehensive in the commitments that spouses make to each other. And when we're done with this, you'll see that marriage is different in kind from other types of human communities.

So first, it comprehensively unites spouses in an act — that means it's going to unite both the hearts, the minds, and the bodies of the spouses. Second, it's going to unite them comprehensively towards a common good, being the good of new human life and of the family life that is hospitable for the raising of new human life, a comprehensive sharing of life. And then lastly, it's going to require comprehensive commitments — a comprehensive commitment throughout time, the commitment of permanence, where you pledge till death do us part, and then also a comprehensive commitment forsaking all others. At every moment of time, you're excluding all others. So it's going to be comprehensive both in "here and now, I'm devoted to you and therefore exclusively devoted to you," and it's comprehensive throughout time, "and I don't have option B waiting in the wings." So it's going to be till death do us part.

All right, let me say a little bit more about each of those three steps. First, what to my mind is what's most at stake in the gay marriage debate in particular, that comprehensive action. So let's start by asking the question: if you wanted to unite comprehensively with another person, you would first need to answer the question, what am I as a human being? If I want to unite comprehensively, that means I'm going to unite at all levels of my personhood, all levels of my humanity. Now, if Descartes was correct, where we're just ghosts and machines, right — Cartesian dualism, where the idea is that there's a mind or there's a soul that just inhabits a body and the body's just a costume — then you would say, yeah, to unite comprehensively is going to be a union of hearts and minds. But if we're bodily beings, right? If we're incarnate, if we are embodied souls or enfleshed souls — however you want to think about the dynamic unity of soul and matter, of form and matter, of body and soul — if the body is part of us, if we are personal bodily beings, then to unite comprehensively with another person is going to require bodily union.

And if you have doubts about your bodily reality, I mean, just think about why we treat something like damage to your car — if someone was to vandalize your car — differently than if someone was to vandalize your body. Because they vandalize you. This is particularly why we treat sexual assault so seriously, right? Because it's harming you, not just harming your property. The body's not just like a suit that you can take on and take off. It's a personal aspect of your very existence. So to unite comprehensively with another person is going to require union at all levels of your being, which is going to require bodily union.

All right, so next question. How do you unite bodily with another person? So if I lick my finger and stick it in your ear, have we united bodily? All right, and you're awake on a Saturday morning. This is great. And the answer is obviously no. What's happened is I've given you a wet willy, right? Maybe, depending on the context, it might be appropriate or inappropriate, but no one's going to say we consummated a marriage, right? That's not the marital act. And we can understand why, because there's no actual union that was formed. Even though there were body parts that touched — you might even say, in some sense, they interlocked, whatever — there wasn't actually a unity formed.

Okay, so now the question is going to become, all right, well, what makes me a unified body? Why am I not just a clump of cells, right? You'll sometimes hear pro-abortion advocates dismissively refer to the unborn child as a, quote, "clump of cells." And they're wrong about the unborn child. They're wrong about the adult. Why are they wrong? Is that that unborn child — you can see this on the very first ultrasound picture — is that it's an integrated, unified organism. Organisms are an assembly of organs that are organized with a union intrinsic to them. And what I mean by that is that our respiratory system, the major organ there being the lung; our circulatory system, the major organ there being the heart; our digestive system, the major organs there being both the stomach and the intestines — go through the list of our various bodily systems, and you'll see that those organs are organized for the sake of that system. But then all those systems integrate with each other. The respiratory system: we inhale, we get oxygen that then gets to the circulatory system, so the heart's pumping oxygenated blood throughout our body. It's taking nutrients from our digestive system. All of these things are not just random clumps of cells or random assemblies of organs. They're all organized. They're all integrated. They're all unified.

And we're complete with respect to every one of those organs and systems that I just mentioned. You have a complete respiratory system. You have a complete circulatory system. If you ate breakfast this morning, you're digesting that on your own. If you're breathing right now, you're breathing on your own. If your heart's beating and your blood's circulating, you're doing all those things on your own. Each and every one of us is radically incomplete, by design, with respect to one bodily system. Each of us has half of a reproductive system. Again, by design. Built into the reality of our embodiment as male or female is that we're organized to be dependent on another person, to be incomplete with respect to this particular bodily system, so that when a man and a woman unite in the conjugal act, they truly become one flesh.

That what the Bible reveals, when it uses the language of the two becoming one flesh, isn't just metaphor, isn't just poetry, isn't just imagery. It's actually revealing to us something that's very true at both the physical and the metaphysical level, that when a man and a woman unite in that conjugal action, they become one single organism with respect to that bodily function of procreation. The reproductive systems unite. They don't just interlock or rub up against each other the way that, you know, if you lick your finger and stick it in someone's ear, that's all you've done. But here they truly form one flesh. And if they engage in that action with marital intentions, that conjugal act becomes the marital act. It becomes the distinctive foundation, the distinctive action of their marital love, and it unites them so completely that nine months later it might require a name.

And this tells us something about the nature of marriage — that the very same act, the lovemaking act, is the very same life-giving act. It's not two different actions that you perform. The very act that unites you as husband and wife might be the act that makes you mother and father, right? Obviously we understand the reproductive cycle, that this isn't going to happen every day of the week or every week of the year, every week of the month, et cetera, et cetera. But it's the same action, that's then going to be contingent upon non-volitional factors — where you are in your monthly cycle for the woman, where you are with respect to menopause, et cetera, whether or not you're currently pregnant — but it doesn't change the very nature of the action that the spouses perform. They unite as one flesh, that action is then ordered toward the creation of new life, which then tells us something about the institution of marriage itself and of the family itself, that it's ordered towards the creation, and not just the creation, but then the rearing, of new life.

We're not like other species that, you know, a chicken lays an egg, it hatches, and then the parenting process is done. That's not what humans do. And it's not just for the first couple of months or couple of years, but, you know, on average it takes 16 to 18 years. Under Obamacare, I think it's 26 years. But, you know, we can debate what the right cutoff is. And actually, I mean, I think if you have a sound understanding of the intergenerational nature of marriage and the family, there actually isn't a cutoff. All that happens is it changes family dynamics, right? But it's not as if there's a certain point where parents stop caring for their children. Grandparents are still caring for their adult children, and they're helping give advice in the right ways for their children as they raise their grandchildren. I mean, you can see that the intergenerational family — we shouldn't just think of this as the nuclear family.

So what marriages are intrinsically ordered towards is being fruitful and multiplying, right? That's not an additional add-on, the way that it might be — you know, I don't think we were chatting this morning, that my wife went to Hillsdale; pastors, I guess both of your daughters went to Hillsdale. I don't think Hillsdale has a football team. If they were to add a football team — they do, it's not very good though — but that would be an add-on, right? Not every college or university has athletic programs, or, you know, even if they do, they don't necessarily have intercollegiate football. But the family is by its nature going to be ordered towards new life.

And then the last step of this analysis. Actually, let me say one more thing about that. It's not just the momentary act of creating the child. It's then going to be the rearing of the child. And then, therefore, it's going to be the sharing of the spouses with each other, right? The good of the marriage is going to include a comprehensive sharing of life, where husband and wife make commitments to each other and then share their lives with each other. This is why spouses should live together. They should sleep in the same bed, apart from extenuating circumstances, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a total, complete sharing of life.

So there's a comprehensive action that unites spouses as one flesh. There's a comprehensive good — the creation of new life and then the family life that goes along with that. And then there are comprehensive commitments — a permanent commitment throughout time, comprehensive in the sense of chronology all the way until death do us part, and then comprehensive at every moment of time, forsaking all others. And what is the bright-line form of exclusivity that marriage calls for? The bright-line form is sexual exclusivity. So any of you who are attending this conference without your spouse, you're not cheating on your spouse, right? Marriage doesn't call for intellectual exclusivity, or theological, religious exclusivity, right? You can pray with people other than your spouse. That's not the bright line. The exclusivity that it calls for is sexual exclusivity. If any of you sleep with someone other than your spouse tonight, that would be a major sin. And all of the forms of emotional or romantic intimacy that would be inappropriate for a non-sexual relationship — right, so it's going to be dependent on that. If you're confiding too much in a coworker, if you're going to be intimate with someone other than your spouse, it's going to be in reference to what is going to be appropriate given that this isn't a comprehensive union and what is. You can have friends, but you shouldn't be confiding in your friends in ways that you should only be confiding in with your spouse, right? So you can see that the type of exclusivity, with the bright line, is going to be sexual exclusivity. And then the other forms of exclusivity are going to be mirrored on that, what is and isn't appropriate.

All right, this vision of marriage can explain all the historical marital norms about how marriage is the foundation of families, how families are going to become intergenerational. The marital act was also known as the generative act, right? Because the very act that unites spouses also can generate the next generation. Even the very idea of generativity, and generations — this will get to the next lecture, gender — this is all coming from the same etymology. This can also explain why historically marriage was exclusive, monogamous, and permanent. This can also explain why the government was in the marriage business — I'm going to get to that in a minute.

Last thing to say about this is that it's not exclusively Christian. Obviously, this is a philosophical foundation that's part of the Christian tradition, but when you look at world history, and when you look at non-Christian thinkers, you actually see that many other political communities and other world thinkers came to something similar to this on their own, which suggests that this was part of creation, right? That this wasn't just something that was revealed, but this was also written on the heart, to borrow St. Paul's language in his letter to the Romans. And so you see this in ancient philosophers like Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Cicero. You see it in Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Immanuel Kant. You see it in Eastern thinkers like Gandhi. And then you see it played out in more or less every political community that lasted long enough to leave a record of itself. Even some of those political communities that had polygamy at the top of society — high-status males might have multiple wives, but only at the top of society, right? For everyone else in society, the societal expectation was one man, one woman, in order to be husband and wife, in order to be mother and father to the children that that union created.

Okay, so why does any of this matter as a public matter? You could say, look, this matters for the church. It's a covenant, it's a sacrament, it's a — I'm trying to speak in ecumenical ways — it's a vector, a means, somehow it conveys grace, trying not to step on any tripwires here with Catholic-Protestant debates. You could say, all right, it matters for the church, the church shouldn't redefine marriage, the church shouldn't be celebrating same-sex marriage. Why does it matter for the state, right? Why is the government in the marriage business in a way that it's not in the baptism business, it's not in the bar mitzvah business? And that's what I was getting at earlier, that marriage does serve both those secular and sacred, both natural and supernatural purposes, right? Because from the state's perspective, it's not in the marriage business because it's a sucker for romance. It's not in the marriage business because it cares about your number one person. There's no registry of best friendships that you go to the state of Iowa and you register for. So why do you register your marriage, right? And that's because the state has an interest in making sure that a man and a woman commit to each other permanently and exclusively as husband and wife, so that any children that they produce will be attached to them as mother and father. That when this doesn't happen, there are social consequences. There are social costs for those children and for those adults.

Marriage is based on an anthropological truth that men and women are distinct and complementary. It's based on a biological fact that reproduction requires both a man and a woman. And it's based on a social reality that children deserve both a mother and a father. Whenever a baby is born, a mother is close by. She's normally in the same room. That's just a biological fact. Now the cultural question, the social question, is: will a father be close by, and if so, for how long? And marriage as an institution, a civic institution, is an institution that tries to get that father to have already committed to that mother, and then the two of them committed to each other, to be prepared to commit to that child. And what have we seen in the United States over the past 50 years, either because of cohabitation and non-marital childbearing — fathers who haven't committed to those mothers — or because of divorce, people who fail to live out those commitments? The broken hearts and the broken homes have had severe consequences for America's children.

All right, let me say two other things about this. One, there's no such thing as parenting. There's mothering and fathering. Men and women parent in distinct ways. Distinct enough that the social scientists can study this and can give you all sorts of technical terms for — you know, fathers, on average and for the most part, engage in what the social scientists call "rough-and-tumble play." Mothers — and that's going to be like wrestling. Actually, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me ask you this question, because now I just gave away the punchline. If I told you it's Saturday morning and you're not in a Davenport church, but you're in a living room, and there is a five-year-old boy and he's wrestling with one of his parents, and the parent is teaching the boy that it's okay to put people in headlocks, but it's not okay to bite or to pull hair or to gouge out eyes — which parent is most likely in the living room? And it's the father, right? And the nervous laughter — you saw where I was going with this. I kind of gave it away prematurely. But that matters. It's not that my wife can't wrestle on the living room floor with my three-year-old son. It's that that's not what comes naturally to her, and it's not what she particularly enjoys. What comes naturally to me — like, I don't have the patience to do half of the things that she does with the kids, because it doesn't come naturally to me — but I enjoy wrestling with my son on the living room floor. And that actually really matters.

Because what the social science shows: boys who grow up without their dads, they're less likely to graduate school, they're more likely to commit crime, less likely to be employed, more likely to be in jail, right? Because what is the father doing that Saturday morning in the living room? What's he doing, you know, a decade later when he's like in the backyard tossing a football, or then, you know, he's helping his son put on a coat and tie, getting ready for his first high school dance? He's helping the boy navigate the trajectory to manhood, right? And there are all these masculine tendencies that need to be channeled in either constructive or destructive pathways. And if you don't learn how to control, distinctively, male masculine aggression, you can see how it goes in the destructive pathway. And that's why you might be less disciplined, have less self-control, less likely to graduate high school, but more likely to end up in jail. And so teaching the five-year-old that headlocks are okay, but the eye-gouging, the hair-pulling, the biting is not, is actually a really important lesson for later in life. And again, it's not that moms can't do this. It's that children do best when they have both the maternal and the paternal influence.

Let me give you a quote on this. And the other thing I should say before going to this quote: dads also do something distinctive for their girls. And the reason I'm focusing on dads is that when we talk about single parenting, it's almost always a single mom, right? And she's not — this isn't meant to stigmatize single moms. She's the hero of the story, right? Because it's the dad who didn't man up. It's the dad who abandoned the family, right? So the single mom is actually the heroic one who took responsibility for the child when the man in this situation did not. But that's the sad reality. When we talk about single parenthood, it's frequently the father who has abandoned the child and the family.

Fathers do something important for their sons; they also do something important for their girls. Fathers, on average and for the most part, are larger than mothers. Fathers, on average and for the most part, have deeper voices than mothers. Fathers, on average and for the most part, were once young boys themselves. And you have to say "on average and for the most part" because of the — but you see what I'm getting at here: they know what the wrong type of boy might be looking for in their daughter. And so fathers tend to be the ones that scare away bad boyfriends. Fathers tend to be the ones that police their daughter's romantic life. And when you step back with social science, girls who grow up without their fathers, they tend to start sexual activity earlier in life, more likely to be pregnant outside of marriage, more likely to have an abortion. So one of the things that fathers do for their daughters — if for the sons it helps navigate that pathway of boyhood to manhood, for the daughters they help protect their daughter's innocence and their childhood, so that they can grow and mature until an age-appropriate time to begin sexual activity, right, which would be inside of marriage in a sound understanding of all of this.

Okay, so let me read you a quote, and then I'm going to ask you which person said it. "We know the statistics: children who grew 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 twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They're 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." All right, so which right-wing nutjob said that? Was that James Dobson? Was that John Paul II? Was that George W. Bush? Barack Obama — before he evolved on the marriage issue. And the reason why — he gave the answer to the question, the reason why, when he was the commencement speaker at Morehouse College, historically black, all-male graduating college. He says, "I have tried to be there for Michelle and my girls, but my father was not there for my mother and me. I want to break that cycle." Now, but having two mothers replace the missing father — when he reads the statistics and he tells you, "We know the statistics," he's just rattling them off — does the missing dad matter any less if there's a second mom? So how do we insist, as a cultural and legal matter, that fathers are essential, when Obama has now evolved to make fathers optional? That's the kind of cultural, legal problem that we find ourselves in.

All right, so let me wrap up this session, and then we're going to get to Q and A. Last thing I wanted to say is, look, what are going to be some of the consequences of the legal redefinition of marriage? Why is it important that DOXOLOGY is kind of equipping you on this topic? Let me mention four.

First, there is no public institution — and by "public" I mean political, legal; I mean, there are public institutions within the church, but there's no public, common cultural, legal institution left that says that children deserve a mother and a father. And increasingly, you will be accused of hate speech if you say that. All four of these consequences, by the way, are going to follow the paradigm of "ideas have consequences" and bad ideas, right? And what we've seen here is that we'll take one vision of what marriage is, and it's been replaced with a different vision of what marriage is. And then the law shapes our culture, the culture shapes our beliefs, and then our beliefs shape our actions. And so, on this first consequence, there is no public common institution that even suggests that children deserve both a mother and a father. What we've done is we've redefined marriage to make men and women interchangeable, and therefore mothers and fathers replaceable. And if you suggest that a child deserves a father when it has two moms, or that a child deserves a mother — anyone who criticized Pete Buttigieg, who recently announced that, you know, he and his partner were going to have a child, and he was very vague about how it is that they are going to have a child. I don't think the biology has changed in the past year. But does that child not deserve a mother? And very few were the conservatives willing to say that. Okay, so that's the first immediate consequence.

Second consequence is that there is no reason why the redefinition of marriage would stop here. And increasingly — what I had mentioned at the very beginning of this lecture — in the run-up to the 2013 and 2015 Supreme Court cases, you had liberals saying, "Oh, no, no, no, no, our vision of marriage can explain monogamy and exclusivity and permanence. You guys are accusing us of being hedonists. You guys are engaging in slippery-slope reasoning." Like, the criticism of people like me, Robby, and Sherif was that, you know, we were being scaremongers. And we were saying, look, if you redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, you get rid of sexual complementarity, here are the likely consequences — we were being accused of scaremongering. Now, five years later, if you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, if you read Slate, Salon, any of the left-leaning magazines, they're all now embracing this as, "Well, yes, that's the logic of this."

And what do I mean by that? Three new words. Now, the redefinitions won't stop. First word: throuple, a three-person couple. It comes from New York magazine. Take the word "couple" and chop off the C and add a "thr" — throuple. And the idea here is that if you go to the Supreme Court and you say, "We demand marriage equality for the same-sex couple," on what basis do you deny marriage equality for the same-sex throuple, or the opposite-sex quartet, right? Sexual orientation doesn't matter. If love equals love, well, why not big love? Right? If marriage is about an intense, emotional, romantic relationship where people care for each other, why can't three people or four people or more engage in that? And so you've probably noticed that there have been all of these magazine and newspaper stories about polyamory, distinct from polygamy. Polygamy would be like a high-status male with multiple wives. Polyamory is group marriage. All three of us are married to each other and we're interchangeable, right? So, you know, I don't want to get into the permutations, but the throuple decides for themselves what their sexual, romantic activities may or may not look like, what the household activities look like. And then the argument is like, "Who are you to judge? Who is the state to judge? We should treat all families equally," right? That's the throuple.

Monogamish. The idea here — this was in a New York Times Sunday magazine story asking the gay rights activist Dan Savage, "What can straight couples learn from gay couples?" And he said they can learn the virtue of the monogamish relationship. And he said this is a two-person relationship, but it's sexually open, and that straight people could learn from gay couples the value of extramarital sex. It's this: the argument is, it's unrealistic to think one person will fulfill all of your sexual needs for the rest of your life. And so you should have a spouse that you make a personal commitment to, but you shouldn't make a sexual commitment to that person. That's the argument for the monogamish relationship. And now you're seeing more and more people talk about the virtue of sexually open relationships, that sexual exclusivity is an outdated stereotype.

And then lastly, the term wedlease. This was in the Washington Post. And the idea here is that, just like you can lease a car or lease a house, why not lease your spouse? The thought was, why not have expressly temporary marriage licenses? When you lease office space, you sign a five-year lease, a ten-year lease — why not sign a five- or ten-year marriage license? That there's an outdated Judeo-Christian superstition that we can make a "till death do us part" commitment. But we can't. Everything in life is transient, everything comes and goes. And the problem with divorce is that people had unrealistic expectations to begin with. You and your spouse had an unrealistic expectation that this was going to be a permanent relationship. And now, ten, fifteen years later, when it's falling apart, you're heartbroken, only because you had the unrealistic expectation to start. Had you only signed up for a wedlease, then you would have said, "All right, look, it's five years. We had to decide if we're going to renew it or not. Eh, things aren't going well, let's move on," right? That's the argument there.

Here's what's really interesting. Whatever you think about the theology of this — and, you know, I think we all agree on that — whatever you think about the morality of this — I think we all agree on that — just think about the social consequences. What the throuple, the wedlease, and the monogamish relationship do is they increase the number of sexual partners that adults have, and they decrease the amount of commitment that adults make to each other, right? None of these articles discussed children. It was all about the consenting adults, the sexual lives of the consenting adults. But what happens when you increase the number of sexual partners that adults have, and you decrease the commitment that they make to each other? You increase the number of fatherless kids. You increase the number of fragmented families. And everything from that statistic that Obama talked about — five times more likely to this, nine times more likely to that, twenty times — all of the negative consequences will just be multiplied. Because every alternative structure for raising kids that social scientists have studied shows significantly poorer outcomes for kids when they're not raised by their married mothers and fathers.

All right, third consequence is to unborn life. And I want to mention this in two ways. The first is that I think theoretically it could be possible to be in favor of gay marriage and to also be in favor of chastity. I've just never heard anyone hold those two views at the same time. And what I mean by that is that the underlying worldview that's in favor of same-sex marriage is the same underlying worldview that says consenting adults should do sexually whatever consenting adults want to do. And that's the worldview that gives us crisis pregnancies, unplanned pregnancies, and therefore abortions. And that if we want to play a long game for our culture of life, we both need to overturn Roe v. Wade and enact pro-life laws, but we also need to recover the virtue of chastity. Not celibacy — I realize I'm talking to a Lutheran audience, so let me clarify my terms. All I mean by chastity here is that sex is a gift from God that's reserved for marriage, right? It's sex outside of marriage that fuels the majority of abortions. Because people have — the argument would be — "I consented to have sex. I didn't consent to have a baby. I didn't consent to take care of a baby." Inside of marriage, many people — not always, but many people — they're hoping for kids. They're trying for kids, right? I mean, people who experience infertility experience it as a cross precisely for that reason. They know what the marital relationship is ordered towards, and when it's not coming as easily as they would hope, they experience that as a hurdle, as a cross. So the first thing to say is that the worldview here is doubling down on the worldview that gives us abortion.

The second thing to say is that many same-sex couples desire, quote, "a child of our own." And what does that mean? It's that they're using various forms of artificial reproductive technologies to create, quote, "children of their own." Again, Secretary Buttigieg has not said how he and his partner have acquired this child. They might be adopting, they might have used one of their sperm, and then they bought someone's eggs, and they rented someone's womb, right? So right there you're going to say "exploitation" to those women, right? Harvesting a woman's eggs and then renting a woman's womb is exploitative. It tends not to be upper-middle-class white women who volunteer to be egg donors or surrogate moms, right? It tends to be women who are economically depressed at the margins of society. They refer to this as surrogacy tourism, when frequently it's women overseas who are being used as surrogate moms — so particularly poor women in countries that aren't as economically developed as America, right? So right there, exploitation.

Second is that most people, when they do this, they will harvest, you know, maybe 20 eggs from the mother. They'll fertilize 10 of those eggs, they'll implant them, and then they'll, quote, "selectively reduce" down to one. Right? Because most parents don't want to be like Octomom, right, the lady who had eight babies. They want one child at a time. But it's really, really hard to do one embryo by one embryo. So they create, you know, ten. And then they will get rid of the nine that they don't want, right? So right there is threats to unborn lives. Each and every one of those embryos is a child. Also, I forgot to mention that then they'll freeze the other ten, right? And so right now we have all of these immature human beings, human beings at the very first days of their existence, languishing in freezers. So the entire assisted reproductive technology space is just full of immorality, injustices, unethical practices, and it's something that straight people started, right? This is what I want to keep hearkening back to. What we're seeing is that things that started with heterosexuality are just being taken to the next level with the redefinition of marriage. It's not that somehow gay people created these problems, but that they took a string of abuses that straight people created and they're just saying, "Why can't we do it too?" And so we also need to think about getting our own house in order. So, two ways that this is going to be threatening unborn human life: the general cultural attitude that undergirded this movement, and then particular exacerbations of assisted reproductive technologies.

And the last thing I'll say, and this will set up, to a certain extent, some of our discussions later today: this will have severe consequences for religious liberty. And this is a feature, not a bug. What I mean by that is that for many activists — not ordinary gay-marriage-supporting citizens, but for many of the activist groups — the religious liberty violations were always intentional. Because the end goal here was not just to be able to go to the courthouse and get a piece of paper that says "we're married." The end goal here was to silence opposition. The end goal here was to receive affirmation. This is why they can't leave the Colorado baker, Jack Phillips, alone. Because Jack Phillips has to be the one to bake the cake, because he has to affirm that he believes that the union of two men is marital. This is why, during the 2020 presidential primaries, Beto O'Rourke said the silent part out loud. Do you guys remember this? He said that, you know, houses of worship that wouldn't perform same-sex marriages might lose their nonprofit tax status. Right? He wasn't just talking about the bakeries or the adoption agencies or the schools. He was actually talking about what goes on in the sanctuary. Because from the activist perspective, it's not just that they want governmental recognition, they want societal recognition. They don't want anyone saying, "We disagree with you. We don't agree. We don't support, we don't affirm."

Which is simply to say that we should not be naive about what we're up against. It's not that, oh, this was a well-intentioned law that accidentally is now being used to conflict with religious liberty. Some of these religious liberty violations were intentional, at least on the part of the activists. I think there are many Americans who are like, "Oh, I didn't see this coming. All I thought I was doing was loving my gay neighbor by being in favor of gay marriage." And I think those people, look, they just weren't paying attention. I think the same thing is now happening on the transgender issue. There are lots of people who are just saying, "Well, I was, you know, an LGB ally, so I should be a T ally as well," and they haven't thought about this at all.

All right, so let me just mention one last thing on the celebrity — this is going to be for professionals: bakers, florists, photographers, marriage counselors, therapists. This is going to be for Christian institutions: Christian schools, Christian healthcare providers, Christian adoption agencies, Christian social services. This is going to happen even for, you know, kind of the church itself, as we saw in that Beto O'Rourke question. And then the last thing I'll say here is: as far as I know, not a single one of those institutions has had a policy where they just say, "We don't serve gay people." Jack Phillips the baker will gladly do happy birthday cakes for his gay customers. Barronelle Stutzman, the florist, who has been sued — she was serving the gay couple that sued her for a decade, doing the get-well-soon flowers, doing the happy birthday flowers. It was only when they asked for wedding flowers, only when they asked for the wedding cake, that these Christian businesses said, "We can't do that. We can't use our God-given gifts and talents to celebrate something that doesn't accord with God's design for marriage."

The reason that Jack Phillips calls his cake shop Masterpiece Cakeshop, too — it's built in. It's actually really neat. It's because he views every cake he creates as a work of art. It's a masterpiece. His logo is a painter's palette with a French whisk. And he says, "Look, my canvas isn't canvas. My canvas is dough and sugar. It's icing, and I'm painting, I'm creating." He literally paints on the cake with food coloring that you, you know, you can eat. That's his paint. But his other reason is from the gospel, is that you can't serve two masters. And so he says, in every product that he sells, he wants it to be something that he can honor his master with. And so there are a variety of cakes that he won't do. He won't do anti-gay cakes. One time someone asked him to do a cake in the shape of a Bible with a paraphrase of a verse from Leviticus, and he said he wouldn't do it because he didn't think it was actually expressing biblical teaching on sexuality in a very charitable way. He wouldn't do cakes that had inappropriate images. Someone wanted a bachelor party cake with inappropriate images, believe it or not. He won't do anti-American cakes because he's patriotic. He won't do a pro-divorce cake — someone wanted to celebrate their divorce, asked him to do half a wedding cake, and he's like, "No, I don't think divorce is something we should be celebrating," right? So imagine like the three-tier wedding cake that you then cut in half, right? And so in all of these cases, he wasn't sued. He was allowed to run his business in accordance with his beliefs. There are certain events he can't celebrate, certain messages he can't send — except on the gay marriage cake. And, you know, he's still in court. He's now — I'll mention that in the next one — he has been asked to do a transgender cake. Blue batter, pink frosting. Boy on the inside, girl on the outside. I mean, you can see where this is going. It's intentional. It's meant to silence people. It's meant to change the minds of the next generation, and it's by design.

All right, let me stop there, because I want to — we started late. We do have time for questions. We're going to take our break, and then we'll do questions after your next spot. We'll run it a little behind for multiple reasons, one of them standing right in front of you. So let's head off to our break, and let's come back.