The case for same-sex marriage has been
politically triumphant, and its victory looks inevitable. It nonetheless is curiously incomplete. It has succeeded, not because the most
sophisticated opposing arguments have been considered and rejected, but because
those arguments have not even been understood.
Those arguments rest on complex claims, either about what sustains the
stability of heterosexual marriages or about what those marriages essentially
are. The most familiar claim, that
recognition of same-sex marriage jeopardizes the heterosexual family, demands
an account of the transformation of family norms in the past half century. Major social change should not be undertaken
without a full awareness of what is at stake.
My
new essay, Judging
the Case Against Same-Sex Marriage, just posted on SSRN and forthcoming in
the Illinois Law Review, thus remedies a major gap in the literature. It critically surveys and evaluates the
arguments against same-sex marriage, focusing on recent writings of Amy Wax,
Robert P. George, and Mary Geach. You
may not be persuaded by them. In fact,
you shouldn’t be persuaded by them. But
you need to know what they are.