Pat Fagan explains how the Supreme Court first put marriage on its track of decline 41 years ago.

The Supreme Court's 

First Assault on Marriage

by Patrick Fagan

The Supreme Court first put marriage on its track of decline forty-one years ago, when it ruled that states could not limit the sale of contraceptives to married couples.

This year, the Supreme Court will render judgment on the institution of marriage. Though most of us don't realize it, the Court first did so forty-one years ago in Eisenstadt v. Baird, a decision that gravely wounded marriage and set the nation on a course of gradual debilitation by ruling that states could not restrict the sale of contraceptives to married people.

In its forthcoming decision, the Court may give marriage the legal coup de grace. Or it may surprise us, redeem itself, and use the occasion to correct the drift of legal thought on sexuality, marriage, and the rights of children. All three are inextricably linked.

In Eisenstadt, the Court overturned Massachusetts state law and pulled new sexual rights for singles out of a hat--but gave no standing to the child born of pre- or extra-marital sex. The Court played God by redefining the purpose of sexuality. In the process it unleashed sex's destructive power detached from marriage. The Court could see rights to contraceptives in the "shadow" of the Constitution but could not see what a blind man could: the right of every child to married parents.

Having set chaos in motion in Eisenstadt, the Supreme Court quickly built the garbage bin for dumping sexual debris in Roe v. Wade, which gave a green light to the killing of 55 million unborn children, the overwhelming majority of whom were conceived by those unmarried singles with new access to contraceptives.

Eisenstadt also denied the community its natural rights--demands of the social order--that parents take care of their children in marriage. Since then, the community has been paying to raise children born outside wedlock. The cost comes in the form of welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, supplementary education, costlier child and adult health bills, more prisons, addiction centers, and mental health services. The list goes on and on, now cumulatively and possibly to the tune of trillions of dollars.

When two unmarried people have a child, their commitment to each other becomes more difficult to turn into marriage. The vast majority will break up within the following five years, even if they currently cohabit, leaving the commons to make up the difference--which it can only partially achieve, at best.

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