Marriage From A Philosophical Standpoint
A few years ago, I read in the New York Times that French feminists were against the legalization of “gay marriage”
in their country. Now these philosophers certainly didn’t run with the
church going, Bible reading crowd. Why then, were they against
something as seemingly harmless as two women, for instance, marrying one
another? It took me years to understand their argument. Admittedly
sometimes I’m a little slow on the draw. Today, however, I think I can
paraphrase it.
They believe that most of us look at marriage all the wrong way. We
see marriage from a self-centered standpoint, instead of a communal
one. To put it bluntly, for them, marriage is not about two people.
Marriage is not about what is “best” for me and mine. Rather, marriage
is the smallest unit of expression for a basic fact, that there are two
sexes, male and female, in the larger community that covers the broad
earth.
Many times the argument that marriage should only be between
a man and woman is under-girded by saying that a man and a man, for
instance, cannot make babies. This is a fact, but at the same time,
there are many couples that have not had children or perhaps will never
have children. Children are a gift from God, a miracle, but does their
presence solidly under-gird the traditional understanding of marriage? I
think the theory of the French feminists is better. For them,
marriage between a man and a woman (with or without children) expresses
truth, that men and women need one another and always will. To put it
another way, we are in this together. They were against changing the
law in France to redefine marriage because a law that says that there is
marriage between two men, or marriage between two women is a decision
to smother community, to smother truth. Marriage between a man and
woman is the most basic expression of the community between men and
women. But it’s not only an expression, it is the most basic building
block, the bricks that hold the house up. When we lose touch with
marriage being between a man and a woman we fall deeper into dark
delusion. The delusion that we can make it on our own, that we are on
our own, that men don’t need women and women don’t need men, the
delusion of misogyny and misanthropy, and that sweet sounding lie to
which Americans are particularly
prone, the delusion of individualism and isolation.
