Logic and the law are being left behind in the debate over same-sex marriage.

Same-Sex Marriage Makes 

Liberal Judges Irrational

by Matthew J. Franck

A New Jersey judge's contorted and nonsensical decision that the state is responsible for the federal government's failure to recognize same-sex marriage highlights the irrationality that permeates the campaign for "marriage equality."

One of the most striking features of the campaign for same-sex marriage has been the prominence of its assault on reasoning itself. The logical relations of legal categories with one another, as those categories represent persons, their interactions, and their rights and duties, are at the heart of all legal decision-making and ideally inform legislative and administrative policymaking as well. But the impulse to redefine marriage so that it is no longer understood as the conjugal union of a man and a woman has been consistently heedless of logic and the rational relations of legal categories.

Begin with the steadfast refusal of same-sex marriage advocates even to define what "marriage" is now supposed to mean. As the authors of What Is Marriage?have tirelessly argued, marriage has had a consistent core meaning, essentially the same rationally defensible one, in every human civilization. Those who reject that meaning haven't offered an intellectually coherent new meaning for the word. Is marriage now simply an affective/sentimental/romantic/sexual relationship of two persons who wish to share their lives together? Then what limiting principle demands that it be sexual, and not affective in other non-sexual ways? Or that marriage be exclusive, with a requirement of fidelity to one's spouse? Or that it be permanent--or even that its dissolution be governed by any standards other than the will of the parties? Or that the relation be limited to two persons, or that it rule out the union of close blood-family members?

Same-sex marriage advocates have offered no serious answers to any of these questions--or, at least, none that do not crumble under the slightest analytical pressure. Rather than say what marriage is--which anyone can see is an absolute prerequisite to saying whether "equality" demands its availability to partners never before thought capable of marrying--these advocates simply shout "marriage equality" ever more loudly, point to an array of "government benefits" linked to marital status, and make their desire for the thing substitute for an argument about what the thing is that they want.

But this is only the most obvious betrayal of reason by same-sex marriage advocates. There are many more.

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