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.
An essay that I've just published in the Illinois Law Review (in its final form; an earlier version was available on SSRN, and has now been replaced by a pdf of the published essay) thus remedies a major
gap in the literature. It critically surveys and evaluates the arguments
against same-sex marriage, focusing on recent work by Robert P. George, Amy Wax, Mary Geach, and a few others. You may not be persuaded by them. In fact,
you shouldn’t be persuaded by them. But you need to know what they are.