To Allan Carlson:

When people of the same sex fall in love and wish to form a permanent, legal bond that at least mimics the marriage commitment, why not let them?

I’m among those who argue that the law has no business standing in the way of such arrangements, while others contend that they would harm society and so should not receive legal recognition.

The dispute has arisen in the presidential and vice-presidential debates, and to explore it in depth I’ve invited historian and author Allan Carlson, president of the Rockford-based Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, to join me in the Rhubarb Patch.

He begins with a response to my challenge: “Why shouldn’t the state bless gay marriages or civil unions?”

To Eric Zorn:

Your question is best answered, I believe, if we first turn it upside down: Why has every healthy human society, through thousands of examples and years, restricted the special status of marriage to heterosexual pairs?

The obvious answer is that human life is naturally heterosexual: A man and a woman must come together (even if via a petri dish) to beget new life. Reproduction is an essential task for any society, and the honor and benefits bestowed through matrimony exist to encourage and protect the act of responsible reproduction.

Centuries of folk wisdom and thousands of contemporary research inquiries in psychology and sociology also testify to a common truth: Children do best in all aspects of life if they grow and develop in an intact home with their two natural parents.

The necessary, complementary roles of fathers and mothers in child rearing enjoy their complete expression in such homes. In this setting, children will—on average—be healthier, happier, more intelligent and better adjusted than when living in any other configuration. The institution of marriage exists, then, to maximize the number of children who reside within a stable, heterosexual setting.

To extend the same honor and special benefits to gay and lesbian couples (or, by logical extension, to bisexual arrangements and “polyamorous” households) undoes, by definition, the very point of granting special status. If all group living arrangements enjoy equal “honor” and “special benefits,” then no arrangement has recognizable honor or special status. And in this case, the only proven, effective incubator of new and healthy human life would be cast aside as merely another lifestyle choice.

To Allan Carlson:

You misread your history (and your Bible) if you think every healthy society has been based upon pairing off. Indeed anthropologists tell us that more than three-quarters of the cultures in the historical record, including many of those wife-intensive Old Testament nations, have allowed it.

And you misread human nature if you genuinely fear that such a modest reform as extending the legal benefits of marriage to gay couples would noticeably depress rates of “responsible” heterosexual reproduction by diminishing the status or importance of conventional marriage. Straight folks like you and me are going to keep marryin’ and breedin’ no matter what anyone’s doing in New Town or who else is granted the “honor and special benefits” we now enjoy and that, to your mind, encourage us.

Your “on average…” argument could be—and has been!—used for all manner of social and biological engineering, just as your argument based upon nature’s purpose was favored by those who opposed letting blacks and whites intermarry. But I’m sure you’d agree that even if studies showed that children of low-income, divorced or mixed race parents were “on average” likely to be less well off, it would not be an argument to forbid the poor from marrying, outlaw divorce, and reinstitute anti-miscegenation laws.

For more than 100 years this country has gradually extended rights, privileges, and respect to more and more groups. To block a further extension you have to do better than cite tradition and the wounded feelings of those who already enjoy such status.

My challenge to you as we move our exchange to the Internet is to get more specific and less theoretical: What actual harm trumps the imperative of equality and fairness to which this nation aspires?

To Eric Zorn:

The issue here is not the relative degree of tolerance accorded homosexuality in past and present cultures. The issue is “same sex marriage.” Outside of a few recent experiments found in Scandinavia, there are no examples in all human history of equal treatment accorded to hetero- and homosexual marriages.

Claims to the contrary, sometimes found in the gay journals, dissolve under serious scrutiny. Rather, as all the great anthropology surveys show, heterosexual marriage can be found “in every known human society,” as George Murdoch writes in his book Social Structure. “Gay marriage” is a novelty peculiar to a few cold places during the last ten years.

You claim that, “straight folks like you and me are going to keep on marryin’ and breedin’ no matter what anyone’s doing in New Town.” But this may not be so. For nearly forty years, Americans have engaged in a broad retreat from marriage and marital childbearing. The marriage rate has fallen from 148 (per 1,000 unmarried women, ages 15-44) in 1960 to 82 in 1996, a decline of 45 percent. The re-marriage rate has fallen even faster. The divorce rate doubled over the same period, while the number of cohabitating heterosexual couples climbed from about 250,000 to 4,240,000 in 1998.

Meanwhile, births within marriage have also fallen from 4.03 million in 1960 to 2.6 million in 1997, an absolute decline of 36 percent. If one looks to the marital birth rate, the decline is 45 percent, and still continuing, toward levels portending depopulation.

Overall, the number of “nonfamily households” (dwellings without marriage or children) has soared from 7.9 million in 1960 to an estimated 31.5 million in 2000. In short, all is not well with heterosexual marriage and fertility; “marryin’ and breedin’” may be disappearing.

True, the causes include basic shifts in the culture (e.g., the disappearance of favorable portrayals of marriage in the media), the economy (e.g., the decline in real male wages and the closely related flow of mothers and potential mothers into the paid labor force), and public policy (e.g., the “no fault” divorce revolution and creation of the “marriage penalty” in the federal income tax during the 1960’s). Fueling such changes, though, has been the sexual revolution, which broke out of the back alleys in the 1960’s and became politicized, seeking to sever the moral bonds of marriage to sexuality and child bearing, and so devalue marriage as an institution.

And this relates to your claim that this is an issue of “equal rights.” It is not. Yes, it is true that some states once had laws prohibiting marriage between men and women of different races. This was wrong. But today, all Americans of certain age—even advocates for “same sex marriage”—have a Constitutionally guaranteed right to marry so long as their marriage partner is someone of the other sex. What advocates for same-sex marriage actually want is a new right, one that would allow them to change the very nature of the institution they claim to respect, and by that change further weaken it.

In one sense, then, the debate over “same-sex marriage” can be welcomed, for it forces us to confront a core question: what is marriage for?

My answer is simple: it exists because only heterosexual intimacy can produce new human life through natural births and because the accumulated wisdom of the species, as well as of all the modern sciences, tell us that stable, heterosexual, two-natural-parent homes are the superior places to rear children.

Now I grant that “social science” bears no absolute truth and that it should always be applied with care to matters of public policy. But consider your implicit argument here. You have already rejected the folk wisdom of the ages (that is, that marriage as a social institution is always reserved to heterosexual pairs). And you would, I suspect, reject the common traditional teaching of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths that homosexuality is a sin.

If you throw out social science as well (what you call the “on average…” argument), what have you left? Only ideology; only social engineering, where you summon the coercive power of the state to begin a new experiment in social relations, one necessarily involving the indoctrination of children into the tenets of sexual radicalism.

And where would you stop with your extension of this new, ideologically charged right? Should incestuous bonds (father-daughter, mother-son, or brother-sister) be blessed by society and the state? What about polygyny (one man, many wives) or polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands)? Do children have sexual rights, including the right to marry adults of their choosing?

What about “polyamorous” groups? Should “bisexuals” have the right to both a husband and a wife? And if you draw a line somewhere else, on what grounds do you deny what you call the gradual, ineluctable extension of “civil rights, legal privileges, and the benefits of our tolerance” to such unfavored groups?

But isn’t homosexuality hereditary, you might retort? Alas, the frantic quest for the elusive “gay gene” remains fruitless. But even if it could be found, this would still not justify publicly sanctioned “gay marriage.” It would be a powerful and morally compelling argument against other kinds of discrimination, in housing, say, or employment. But marriage exists to promote responsible procreation and superior child rearing. By definition, gay sex is always sterile, and so disqualified.

But won’t science soon allow gays to clone themselves, you might persist? Anything is possible, I suppose. Yet at this point, the argument for gay marriage passes into the realm of science fiction. For me, I’ll stick with other measures of truth. For in this case, the whole of human history, the teachings of the great Western religions, the common sense of the people, and the social and biological sciences all agree: marriage exists to produce and protect children; and, by nature, it can only be heterosexual.

To Allan Carlson:

I don’t know where you get the idea that allowing gays and lesbians to marry or form civil unions would be “coercive.” In fact, to me, one of the striking features of the theoretical extension of this right to marry is how little such reforms would ask of others.

The proposal does not ask you to give up your rights nor does it threaten you or your family in any way other than the most tangential and attenuated (and, I should add, dubious) fashion that you suggest.

Your idea, if I may paraphrase, seems to be that allowing gays to form legal, socially recognized unions will indoctrinate children into the “tenets of sexual radicalism,” thus harming their ability or desire to form stable, loving, heterosexual marital relationships. This in turn will lead to an increase in the percentage of children being reared in non-traditional homes and put us at risk for depopulation.

Your trend statistics are interesting, but, as you honestly observe, there have been quite a few “basic shifts in the culture” since 1960, and the cause-and-effect relationships here are exceedingly murky. We are in agreement that a host of significant legal and technological and social developments have gone into reshaping our society and changing many attitudes.

But my suspicion is that the increased tolerance of homosexuality is a very minor part of the overall equation, and my contention is that, since a small percentage of the population is always going to be gay, it’s a good thing—gays have, on average, better lives than they did 40 years ago.

Do you long for the days when they were even more marginalized and ostracized than they are now? Do you wish them back in the closet?

What’s marriage for? Good question. Historically and currently it serves a variety of functions not limited to responsible, “superior” child rearing. If it were only about child rearing, society would discourage sterile men and women from marrying and not sanction new marriages for those women who are beyond child-bearing years.

Long-term child-free marriages would be afforded none of the rights and privileges of marriage. And once the children of a marriage were grown, the marriages would be devalued or legally dissolved.

But marriage is about more than reproduction. It’s also about companionship. It’s about the socially stabilizing value of sexual monogamy. It’s about the power of long-term, committed partnerships to achieve more in a variety of areas than individuals can on their own.

I’m sure your marriage is about much more than just the children you and your wife have together and that many of your considerable achievements would not have been possible without the comprehensive forms of support she has provided for you over the years.

Certainly this is true in my household, and even though I suspect I got the better end of the deal my wife and I made 15 years ago when we were married, I like to think it’s been a two-way-street, that our union has made both of us stronger in a variety of ways, some of which make society as a whole that much better.

I would no more deny gay people the right or opportunity to form such a union than I would deny an elderly or sterile heterosexual couple that right. They, too, can benefit from the solemnity and social recognition of permanent commitment. They, too, can find comfort and health in sanctioned monogamy. They, too, can use the solidity of a formalized, permanent relationship to do more and be more as individuals—to strengthen their communities, their workplaces, their social networks.

Marriage also has a political and property-rights dimension and is often rooted in the pragmatic needs of a society. That’s why polygamy and in some cases polyandry have been sanctioned and practiced in, as I noted, the majority of societies in the archeological record.

I don’t mean to write a brief for that cause—it’s a bit tangential—but at the same time I could certainly imagine a Mormon version of Allan Carlson making a perfectly plausible argument that polygamy is an excellent, even superior way to raise children. The counter-argument might be that, given our demographics, the increased numbers of men without any mates or marital prospects whatsoever would cause an overall destabilizing effect on society.

Should children be allowed to marry adults or other children? No, for the same reason that we deny other rights to children.

Should family members be allowed to marry? The biological risks of in-breeding suggest not, though I don’t think that the instinctive revulsion we all feel at the idea of, say, a 50-year-old man marrying his 48-year-old sister or an adopted brother marrying an adopted sister when they have different biological parents is an intellectually honest argument against it.

Bisexual marital groupings of three or more? My view would be that, as long as the legal rights and responsibilities of all parties are clearly spelled out and understood, society would have an interest in blocking such a contractual arrangement only if significant harm could be demonstrated. What would it possibly matter if Bob and Carol and Ted down the block share a house and a really big bed and have a comprehensive contractual arrangement that obligates them to one another?

Is homosexual activity sinful? Let me stipulate that it is only in order to argue that society’s right to regulate sins that occur behind closed doors between consenting adults is or at least ought to be quite limited. Lots of things are described as sinful in the great western religions that most of us here in America feel the government has no business meddling in. Sabbath breaking, for instance. Making graven images. Cursing God.

Gradually, it seems to me, we are coming around to the idea that to proscribe a certain activity, the law has to demonstrate more than just that a lot of people—the majority even—don’t like it or find it distasteful.

To wit: We can’t, or shouldn’t, simply outlaw a drug because people like to take it because it makes them feel good. We have to, or ought to, demonstrate that the social cost of allowing the legal use of that drug creates a significant enough harm to justify making it illegal.

And this is where I think your argument so far is failing. You haven’t demonstrated such harm. Speculation is simply a cousin to hysteria. Tradition is clearly related to historical abominations. Contemporary understanding of social justice demands an answer, so let me rephrase the question:

If we remove the word “marriage” from the debate, do you have an objection to gay couples being allowed to form a contractual relationship that specifies all the mutual rights and responsibilities of heterosexual marriage? And if not, which of those rights and responsibilities would you not allow them to share? Why?

To Eric Zorn:

By all means, homosexuals—just as all other Americans—have the clear right to craft legal contracts allowing them to share their incomes and accumulated wealth, jointly purchase a house, promise to care for each other in sickness and old age, celebrate the holidays together, be faithful to one another, pass on all worldly goods to the survivor, and punish the party who breaks the contract. Indeed, such contracts could easily be made stronger than existing state-blessed heterosexual marriages.

“No-fault” divorce laws currently allow one partner to end—unilaterally, at will, and without penalty—a marriage, leaving the legal status of American marriage today weaker than the average business deal. By relying on private contracts, rather than frail state-blessed marriage law, gay couples would give up only a handful of public benefits (e.g., a non-working spouse’s ability to claim some Social Security) and would for the reasons cited above probably be better off in the bargain.

But this route, already available, seems to have little appeal to those in the homosexual community. I suspect this is because their real goal is not to secure the material benefits of marriage. Instead, they seek public blessing for their choices and behavior, and choose to appropriate the institution of marriage to secure that imprimatur.

This I do oppose. For as I explained before, the institution of marriage—even the frail and legally battered version now found in the United States—exists to bless, protect, and encourage heterosexual bonds that will produce new human life and rear such children under optimal conditions (that is, with a father and a mother).

The fuss that we make about each new marriage—both at the wedding and in law—exists because it is only in new heterosexual unions that community renewal occurs, through the birth of children in responsibly constructed homes. Gay couples, by definition, cannot create new life. For this reason, they are denied marriage: again, by definition.

But you properly ask about those heterosexual couples who also cannot produce new life. Why should they be granted the blessing of marriage? At the level of theory, I grant that a community has less interest when two 70-year-olds marry than when two 25-year-olds do. And I think everyone instinctively understands this. Marriages among the elderly rarely draw the brouhaha, the crowds, and the nervous hopes that marriages among the young do.

All the same, sterility is not an absolute condition among heterosexual pairs. I have known many married couples who have been told by eminent medical authorities that they could not bear children and who, sometime later, were the happy parents of an unexpected baby. Would you want to institute state-run fertility tests before issuing a marriage license? For me, I am happy to respect the natural form (one man married to one woman), and let nature take its course.

Moreover, even the truly sterile heterosexual couple can still fulfill the other half of my rationale for exclusively heterosexual marriage: children grow up best in a home with both a mother and a father. This is, I repeat, a common lesson of both the social sciences and the inherited wisdom of the species. The complementarity of man and woman works even in cases of adoption, or among grandparents rearing their grandchildren. It is not just a matter of two people. One man and one woman are emotionally best equipped to rear successfully those children committed to their care. For this reason alone, even the sterile heterosexual couple deserves the state’s blessing of marriage.

At another level, I suspect that our real quarrel is over the very possibility of a moral order, supported by law and public policy. You say you are ready to let the state endorse at least some incestuous marriages, “bisexual” marriages of three or more, and polygamy, in addition to gay unions. You do reject the marriage of a child to an adult of the former’s choosing, but for very ambiguous reasons. I see nothing in your argument (except historical precedent which you relentlessly mock elsewhere) that would deny, say, the child of twelve his or her “sexual rights.”

For me, good law openly rests on the natural order, or the natural law. On the question of marriage, revelation, common sense, and the physical and social sciences all agree: the human family order is heterosexual; our society rests on the building by men and women of the permanent sexual and economic bonds that we call marriage. And this public honor is granted because only heterosexual bonds can create new life and offer the best environment for the rearing of children.

To Allan Carlson:

I think you have, in fact, exposed an element of the homosexual agenda: They want “public blessing for their choices and behavior.” How outrageous of them to have the same fundamental desire for respect and recognition as moral people such as you and your wife! When they can’t even procreate naturally!

You don’t seem to want to deny them much in the way of fundamental contract rights ... or do you? You mention Social Security benefits as one area where no civil contract could extend those benefits conferred by the traditional marriage contract.

What about hospital visitation, probate, and so on? Specifically, which parts of the strictly legal contract of marriage do you feel should be denied to gay couples if they wanted to go about the whole thing piecemeal, making contracts with one another to cover the basket of benefits?

If the number and quality of such benefits is small to non-existent or simply insignificant, then I presume you’d have no objection to the creation of omnibus contracts, and if so, I must assume that what’s inspiring your opposition here is nomenclature.

You don’t want the word “marriage” co-opted by these couple who are unable to have children and whose reproductive parts don’t fit together as nature intended. You don’t want your government or your society to “bless” them. It strikes me, though, that it is a church or a community that “blesses” a marriage; that blessing is a religious notion and should stand apart from the law, even as marriage itself is a sacrament. Your objection to gay marriage strikes me as analogous to the objection a rabbi might make to the idea of a gentile bar mitzvah.

“Bar mitzvah” has a certain meaning among Jews and in the culture, and it would chip away at that meaning and significance if they allowed any teenaged boy of any faith who sought a solemn, sacred rite of passage into adulthood to have a bar mitzvah ceremony in their temples. I would endorse and defend that objection, so long as the state were not the provider of bar mitzvah certification. Which clearly it’s not. But if it were—if the state licensed bar mitzvahs and first communions and baptisms—I would see a very knotty First Amendment problem and would be among the first to suggest that the state not be in the business of blessing various spiritual transitions and passages, and should leave those matters to the churches.

So we have two ideas, the domestic contract and the man-woman union as sanctified and blessed by a church or community. They are interwoven in the legal notion of “marriage” for, I’m sure, sound historical reasons in nations that, I’m also sure, had little or no tradition of keeping such church/state matters separate.

So if the words “marriage” and “blessing” are the sticking points, perhaps they should be relegated to the religious domain whence they came and where they belong.

Yet if I read you right, you find even the term “civil union” objectionable when it comes to gay people. This, again if I read you right, is objectionable because it suggests the state’s imprimatur on their sexual conduct, which is, to put a neutral spin on it, non-productive.

I mean, I know you like to throw around words like “immoral” and cite “natural law” when it’s convenient (though I can’t help observing that nature tells men to copulate with girls as young as 13 or 14, to copulate with as many females as possible, and to discard them once they have raised his young and can produce no more offspring) but let me push this issue a little further: What is it you find immoral or wrong about homosexual conduct, specifically? Is it that it is sex purely for pleasure? Is it that it employs body parts in fashions that nature did not intend or that have no conceivable natural purpose? Is it your position, then or in any case, that the law should discourage or forbid sex for pleasure or sex that employs body parts in unnatural ways?

When states have repealed their sodomy laws that applied in many cases to men as well as women, was that a mistake in your opinion? Did it send the wrong message? Should the law discourage and forbid, say, oral sex between consenting (even married) men and women? Or should we, as I advocate, mind our business when it comes to consenting adult behavior behind closed doors?

Now, about the children. The latest figures I’ve been able to find (feel free to update them) show than 22 states allow lesbians and gay men to adopt children either through state-run or private adoption agencies

After reviewing available research, the American Psychological Association concluded that “not a single study has found children of gay or lesbian parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents,” and that “home environments provided by gay and lesbian parents are as likely as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children’s psychosocial growth.” The Child Welfare League of America and the North American Council on Adoptable Children have concluded that gays and lesbians should be treated equally in adoption application review.

“Children of lesbian mothers develop patterns of gender-role behavior that are much like those of other children,” says the APA. “No data are available as yet in this area for children of gay fathers ... The data do not suggest elevated rates of homosexuality among the offspring of lesbian or gay parents. Research has shown that concerns about difficulties in personal development in these areas (separation-individuation, personality, self-concept, control, moral judgment, and intelligence) among children of lesbian mothers are unwarranted.”

The contrary response to this that I could find—and, again, I trust you will do better—was griping about the inadequacy of the studies and celebrations of the nuclear family, not citation of studies that showed that the above was in error.

Is a child better off being raised in a home with a mother and a father who don’t get along or where one of them is seldom present, or in a stable, loving two-mommy or two-daddy household? And at what level of optimality or sub-optimality are you willing to say the state, which you conservatives so seldom trust in other matters, should play social engineer and attempt to tell people how to live their lives and how to raise children?

One last galling point. David Miller, cited as the national field director for the Mississippi-based American Family Association, was paraphrased in an article I found on the web as objecting to gay parenting, because “homosexual relationships are less stable, and therefore children raised by homosexuals are less likely to have the ‘emotional stability’ to maintain social relationships.”

Well, gee. Catch 22: If these relationships are, in fact, less stable than heterosexual relationships, maybe the way to making them more stable is to let them formalize their relationship in the eyes of the state. Y’think?

To Eric Zorn:

Regarding benefits, I will clarify my point: homosexual pairs have the full legal right to craft private and legally enforcable contracts covering whatever law and custom might allow, including hospital visitation rights and inheritance. And there are no obstacles that I see to the development of standard contracts of this sort.

I understand there are even a few avant garde religious groups that will “bless” such unions, which should satisfy your own skittishness regarding state interference. I do not seek to deny any citizen, homosexual or otherwise, any of these opportunities. But I do oppose your attempt to take the word “marriage,” as it exists in culture and law, and twist it into something radically different.

Of course, the real issue is more than that of semantics. Marriage is also an institution, the foundation of social order and community renewal, universal to the human experience. It bears these qualities because it is the responsible source of new life; it channels the powerful sexual impulse toward the creation and effective rearing of children. Marriage exists as a unique cluster of religious, social, and legal rights and obligations because of this procreative potential.

You point to the old laws forbidding or discouraging even certain forms of heterosexual contact and ask if I want them back. This is not on my agenda, for I would not want to give the modern state this intrusive power; it has too many already. But I will acknowledge that these old laws against sodomy and other practices did have one virtue: they took sexuality seriously. Without denying that pleasure was an aspect of the sexual act, these statutes implicitly underscored that more important matters were at stake.

The so-called Sexual Revolution, which broke out of America’s back alleys in the 1960’s, has a radically different agenda: to make the pursuit of pleasure the primary, or even exclusive, purpose of sexuality. And so the Revolution has necessarily sought to devalue marriage, and its rival claims regarding sexual purpose.

I readily acknowledge that the Sexual Revolution has unsettled things, and won some cultural victories. As The Playboy Press’ own “Official History of the Sex Revolution” (entitled The Rape of the A*P*E*—*American *Puritan *Ethic) happily concludes: “The Revolution left a lot of devastation in its path, but nothing was reduced to less recognizable rubble than the revered...Institution of Marriage.”

But then, in a remarkable fit of candor, the book also describes the broader consequences of Eros unguided: “Everything got devalued….The American flag was devalued. Marriage was devalued. Virginity. Love. God. Motherhood….The quality of men available to lead was devalued..., our institutions and our customs were devalued; the worth of an individual was devalued.” Here, Good Ol’ Hef and his friends have it about right. Sex “freed” from its procreative purpose diminishes—rather than enhances—human existence.

Marriage, even in today’s battered, post-Revolution, legal form, still exists to remind men and women that sexuality has life-giving and community-renewing ends transcending that of mere pleasure. By nature—or if you prefer “by definition” (I know you dislike use of the word, “nature”)—gay sexual acts cannot be procreative. They must focus on the pursuit of pleasure. Conferring the word “marriage” on such bonds denies its very meaning and the institution’s first purpose. It is to diminish marriage in pursuit of other agendas.

But, you say, perhaps homosexuals can join in community renewal by adopting children. Up to this point in your argument, you have uniformly dismissed the social and natural sciences as irrelevant, or even dangerous. But here, you summon in the “available research” showing “no harm,” including a pronouncement from the American Psychological Association, to buttress your case.

You really should have held to your anti-science stance. For as I think you already know, none of your evidence can pass the “keep a straight face” test. As one scholar explains in a recent issue of the University of Illinois Law Review, “most of the so-called ‘scientific’ literature which purports to show that homosexual behavior by parents has no detrimental impact upon children is methodologically flawed, based on distorted designs, small skewed samples, and a priori [non-scientific] analysis.” Another researcher, Philip Belcastro, concludes that most of these studies “were biased towards proving homosexual parents were fit parents. [S]ome of the published works had to disregard their own results in order to conclude that homosexuals were fit parents.” In short, a political agenda here seriously distorts the sciences.

I suppose you will call such critical responses “griping.” I call them attempts to protect children from reckless social engineers. I am simply astonished at your readiness to subject children to social-sexual experimentation on this scale, in defiance of all human experience and without the backing of any reputable research. All the real evidence suggests that you would put the children so affected at great risk of negative outcomes.

The same real evidence shows that children do best growing up with their natural mother and natural father. As the mounting evidence on the long-term effects of divorce also indicates, even with parents who do not get along very well, children still do best if the adults stay together “for the sake of the children.” So once again, the old wisdom proves to be true.

Marriage exists as a social and legal institution to encourage the formation and maintenance of such homes, for the sake of the children. Let it be.

To Allan Carlson:

I apologize for the three-month lapse between your most recent argument and my (final) reply (per our agreement, you will have the last word after this response). I’d like to say at the outset that I think this exchange has been a success, even though it hasn’t really gotten anywhere. Both of us have outlined our points completely and readers will come away with a good understanding of the differences between us.

I conclude that you have a distorted, crabbed view of homosexuality and homosexuals. What you write suggests that you view them through a keyhole that only allows you to see their sexual acts, which you find distasteful. When you see a gay or lesbian couple you make snap judgments and assumptions about the role of sexuality in their lives, their fitness to be parents, and their larger moral notions—you cannot and will not first see them as a couple, two human beings who love each other and share a great deal more than an interest in one another’s gonads. And, accordingly, you hope to deny them access to full human rights and opportunities.

You do a lot of hand waving to cover up this fundamental, visceral prejudice.

Every time you fend off my hypotheticals about child rearing you back deeper into the dark corner of this position. Those who read this exchange will see that I’ve demonstrated that it’s not really the capacity to reproduce biologically that to you validates straight-only marriage—you ultimately admit that when you allow that you have no objection to sterile or elderly heterosexual couples marrying.

And they will see also that it’s not social science, either—you would not, I’m sure, suggest that mixed-race couples should not be permitted to marry even if social scientists were to show that the children of such unions had tougher lives than the children of same-race unions.

When we strip your position bare, it boils down to your personal moral notion that homosexuality is immoral, and we ought to do everything we can to discourage it and marginalize gay people.

Let me clarify my view of social science , which, for the record, I never “brand(ed) as irrelevant, or even dangerous,” your assertion to the contrary. I merely pointed out to you, as I do again, that it is simply not enough to assert that some psychologists don’t support the American Psychological Association’s conclusion about children raised by gay couples.

You don’t even tell us what Mr. Belcastro or anyone else has to say about the magnitude of these alleged harms and to what you or anyone else compares them to.

I say that if you are going to make the case that, as a matter of public policy, we should not allow gay couples to adopt children, then as a good social scientist you have first to create “adopt/not-adopt” standards. And you or any other social scientist or policy maker are welcome to do so.

Create a matrix and play with the variables…things that seem to be related to positive outcomes for children as you define them. All day long every day of the week social scientists work at isolating variables, and I’m sure with enough work they could isolate this one, as well as other variables such as income of parents, education of parents, employment status, criminal record, number of other siblings in the home, etc.

For the purposes of argument let’s say that you could assign each variable a plus or minus score. And for the purposes of intellectual and scientific honesty, then, let’s say you drew a bright line at a certain score: Minus 8, say. Every prospective adoptive couple scoring minus 8 on the Carlson Scale would not be allowed to adopt. That, to me, would be a defensible and honest application of social science to achieve a desired end.

What’s dangerous, though, not to mention dishonest, is to pick one variable based on your moral outlook and say this variable should be determinative. It’s arbitrary. It’s un-American.

I am not and never was “anti-science.” I am anti-sloppy, disingenuous, and the ill-motivated use of fragmentary scientific data.

What was good and what was bad about the so-called Sexual Revolution is a different discussion, yet I find the warmth with which you pick up the subject to be telling. A couple of things are worth pointing out, though: The cultural shift in our attitudes and practices regarding sexuality was not the result of one person, one institution, or some sinister outside force. It was the result of a huge number of interlocking social and even technological factors, and it should be noted that increased tolerance and rights for homosexuals came awfully late in this “revolution” and hardly led the way.

It was, in all, a popular revolution and, believe it or not, I believe you and I share some sentiments of dismay about how far things have gone in culture and entertainment. I find the shallow commercialization of sex and the stark sexual images and messages to which children are exposed depressing, even outrageous. It makes me wish people weren’t the way they are, and it makes me despair of changing them. It seems to me that stressing sexual responsibility and commitment is a fine idea, but one not at all inconsistent with recognizing and even “blessing” in a secular way committed homosexual relationships. Such relationships are not, I submit, even a measurable part of the problems you identify.

It’s a mistake and misleading oversimplification for you to attempt to place sexual acts into two categories—those that are procreative (good) and those that “focus on the pursuit of pleasure” (bad). Sex is so much more than that—for gay people, too, I’m told—and I’m confident that if you looked within your own life and your own situation you would recognize this. Sex is also often about intimacy, emotional sharing, profound connections, important non-verbal communications.

If I may be frank about this, my wife is no longer able to have children—she had a hysterectomy in 1998—and therefore one can say that our relations are “freed from their procreative purpose,” as you put it. But I find it objectionable—hideously, offensively, contemptibly so—for you to suggest that our relations therefore diminish rather than enhance human existence.

I don’t dislike the use of the word “nature,” by the way. I simply point out that you toss it around freely until it boomerangs on you—your attitude toward “nature” is contradictory. Where it supports your argument, you embrace it. Where it doesn’t, you ignore and hope to override it with your moral teachings.

Before turning the floor over to you to conclude, I’m going to suggest that, in the end, I think, we agree that gay couples ought to be allowed to form comprehensive, omnibus social contracts that mimic the obligations and rights of heterosexual matrimony, and we also agree that the state ought not have laws that interfere with or forbid homosexual relationships or consensual adult homosexual activity. Am I right?

If so, then I think it’s a sign that though my side and your side will probably never come close to full agreement on this issue, we have found enough common ground on which to stand peacefully while the endless debating goes on.

Thanks for being such an incredibly worthy and patient adversary. Perhaps we shall tangle again on the radio.

To Eric Zorn:

Since my reply marks the end of our exchange, I will confine myself to restating my key points, free of possibly misleading characterizations.

You say that I have “a distorted, crabbed view of homosexuality,” engage in “hand waving to cover up this fundamental, visceral prejudice,” and fail to see a gay or lesbian couple as “two human beings who love each other and share a great deal more than an interest in one another’s gonads.” Actually, I have said almost nothing about the nature of homosexuality or the behavior of gays and lesbians, other than reporting that homosexual sex is, by definition, always non-procreative. Since the institution of marriage exists—first and foremost and in all times and places—to encourage responsible procreation and childrearing, I logically oppose extending its prestige and benefits to same-sex couples.

My point on “social science” is simple: intact, heterosexual marriage IS the key variable in childrearing. Thousands upon thousands of research studies in all disciplines testify to a common conclusion: children raised in homes with natural parents who are married have the best prospects for growing up healthy, well-educated, productive, and happy. The core purpose of marriage law is to guide human procreation and childrearing so that the maximum number of children are born into and reared in two-natural-parent homes. To extend legal marriage to gay and lesbian couples would confuse, even subvert that core purpose.

This focus on “the good of children” explains, as well, why marriage between men and women who cannot bear children also enjoys public affirmation. They can still take part in the rearing of children through adoption, with good prospects for success because their structure still provides both a mother and a father. Their circumstance also reinforces a social model that encourages young adults toward stable, heterosexual unions. Phrased another way: when the questions is “what is best for the young,” it is proper to extend the general rule (heterosexual marriage) beyond the principle purpose (procreation).

As you note, we do share common ground. I certainly do not seek to deny homosexuals their right to craft private, comprehensive contracts “that mimic the obligations and rights [relative to each other] of heterosexual matrimony” (and “progressive” churches are at liberty to bless such unions). Nor do I advocate the enforcement of anti-sodomy laws among consenting adults (because the opportunity for governmental mischief is too great). But I do assert that the public institution of marriage should be reserved exclusively for heterosexual unions. It is on this institution and through these tasks that any community—including ours—must build its future. Accordingly, marriage should not be the object for a new round of social engineering.

In closing, I want to note that I have learned from this exchange, and I have enjoyed the opportunity to be a player in The Rhubarb Patch. I look forward to our next meeting.