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TechnoratiMarriage is designed for sex and sex is designed for marriage. Nonmarital sex ultimately harms the individual and society. Marriage, as I have already shown, is also exclusively heterosexual in that it conforms to the biological design for human sexuality and fulfills the reproductive principle. While same-sex couples may enjoy an emotional bond and engage in sexual acts, they are unable to achieve this one-flesh union because there is no biological communion such as that achieved through procreative acts. In the absence of this biological principle, sex becomes merely instrumental for self-satisfying pleasure and therefore falls into the same destructive category of self-centered acts that characterize all nonmarital sex.
Any deviation from this proper relationship for sex (i.e., marriage), as well as its proper biological design (i.e., homosexual), is a perversion of human sexuality; history demonstrates that such deviations will inevitably undo those societal goods associated with marriage and the natural family.
So what are these “goods” that derive from marriage? According to the eminent University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite, there are a multitude of documented benefits unique to natural marriage that would be nullified if marriage were altered. For example:
Married people live longer, are healthier, have fewer heart attacks and other diseases, have fewer problems with alcohol, behave in less risky ways, have more sex—and more satisfying sex—and become much more wealthy than single people. (As quoted by Robert Browning in a book review of The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher).
Regarding mortality, studies reveal that “mortality rates are 50 percent higher for unmarried women and 250 percent higher for unmarried men than they are for married women and men” (Waite and Gallagher, The Case for Marriage [New York: Broadway Books, 2000], 47). In regards to men matched in every respect except marital status, nine out of ten married men who were alive at age forty-eight made it to sixty-five; only six out of ten bachelors lived to the usual retirement age (Waite and Gallagher, 50).
Mortality rates for homosexual men are even higher. According to a study that appeared in the International Journal of Epidemiology, which examined the homosexual community in Vancouver, Canada, “Life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men” (Robert S. Hogg et al., “Modeling the Impact of HIV Disease on Mortality in Gay and Bisexual Men,” International Journal of Epidemiology, 26 [1997]: 657).
Another overlooked benefit of marriage is that of physical security for women. While some may want you to believe that marriage facilitates the oppression and subjugation of women, the reality is that spousal abuse is not the primary source of domestic abuse in this country; it is nonspousal abuse. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey conducted by the US Department of Justice, of all violent crimes against domestic partners (male/female) that occurred between 1979 and 1987, boyfriends or ex-husbands commit the overwhelming majority of crimes. In total, 20 percent of women report having been assaulted by their partner. However, husbands presently living with their wives committed only 9 percent of these crimes. The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that being unmarried puts women at a much higher risk of domestic abuse.
Abuse within male homosexual relationships is as high as 46 percent (“Domestic Violence in Gay and Lesbian Couples,” www.psychpage.com/gay/library/gay_lesbian_violence). Among lesbian couples, some research shows that the lifetime prevalence of physical assault among women living with female partners was 35.4 percent. Given that same-sex “marriage” would exist in name only without its essential defining elements, its application to homosexual couples would, most likely, not serve to arrest the high rates of domestic abuse among gays. Continue »
Daniel Paul »
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