MARRIAGE DEBATE: A PUBLIC THEOLOGY OF MARRIAGE, THE

Trinity Journal, Fall 2007 by Kynes, William L

A second objection to connecting the state's interest in marriage to child-bearing is that the law has not required the ability or intention to bear children to be a prerequisite for marriage. However, the traditional law has required that the sexual relationship which marriage embodies be of a "reproductive type," in other words, the couple fulfills the behavioral conditions of procreation, whether that is their intention or biological conditions make procreation possible. To require more than that is rightly viewed as an invasion of privacy. As Don Browning and Elizabeth Marquardt contend:

It is one dung for the law not to question the capacity of opposite-sex couples to have children, be they infertile, too old, uncertain, or disinterested. In the name of privacy, the law rightfully does not pry, partially because tilings change (infertility is sometimes corrected, people sometimes change their minds), and the elderly traditionally have married to honor the child-centered view of marriage and the need to symbolically reinforce the norm of integrating sex, love, dependency, child-birth, and childrearing into the institution of marriage.39

Whether it is the intent of the couple or not, marriage, by its very nature, is a "reproductive alliance." The expansion of the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples would radically alter this basic justification of the state's concern in regulating marriage, and it would reinforce a notion of marriage as something entered into purely for personal fulfillment, thus only increasing the likelihood of divorce.40

A Christian theology of marriage emphasizes the relational dimension of marriage, but the "one-flesh" experience as a relational union cannot be separated from the particular sexual dimension of that relationship as one involving a man and a woman. It is as a "one-flesh union" of a man and a woman that human beings form that new organic unit which alone is capable of reproduction. Reproduction is unique as a human biological function in that it cannot be accomplished by an individual male or female, but only by a male and a female as a mated pair. In the act of sexual intercourse, which alone is "reproductive in type," they become a single organism, a single reproductive principle, or, in biblical terms "one flesh"-a union of persons created through the marital act. A "marital act" in this sense is distinctly a "reproductive act" whether it is that in effect or in motivation.41 Thus, the unitive purpose of marriage is inherently linked to its procreative potential. This provides the central public interest in the regulation of marriage, for as Robert George writes, marriage is "a one-flesh communion of persons united in a form of life uniquely suitable to the generation, education, and nurturing of children."42

What makes marriage uniquely suitable to provide the optimum environment for the generation, education, and nurturing of children is grounded in the natural care that biological parents are inclined to give their children. This biological-social effect is known as "kin altruism." Don Browning and Elizabeth Marquardt describe this as