Sex and the institutions, customs, and restraints related to it are basic to social order. That claim shouldn’t be controversial, and it’s odd that it has become so.

Sex and the Public Order

by James Kalb

Older political philosophers such as Aristotle, who viewed man as naturally social, found it self-evident to start their analysis of society with the union of man and woman in marriage and build from there. Such a view has many virtues. For one, the natural authority of the family, and the need to supplement and complete it, explain the authority of government, and why it is necessary to social order but not its basis. The approach makes political life naturally multileveled and limited, and so makes it easy, without the aid of shaky inventions like the liberal theory of human rights, to avoid the extremes of anarchy and tyranny that seem at home in political thought today.

The older view has been eclipsed, for reasons that include individualism and the increasing role of bureaucratic and industrial forms of organization. The current tendency is to begin political thought with the atomic individual, and then construct the state as the protector of his well-being. The family then becomes a legal contrivance or a private contract among individuals rather than a fundamental institution in its own right. That is the view that recently led the Supreme Court to treat restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples as an expression of intent to harm same-sex couples. After all, if marriage is an invention of government, and it’s what particular individuals want that matters, why should government facilitate the desires of some more than others?

Such views, while urged on us by the most reputable authorities, are completely unrealistic. It is absurd to say marriage and the family are a creation of the state when they long existed without it. And to reduce marriage to a private contract makes it, as the Marxists suggested, very much like prostitution. To the contrary, marriage and the family are part of what defines who their members are. How can that be just a contract or a legal artifice? The way to think about the family that best fits the place it has enduringly held in human life is to assume it as a normal fundamental part of the human world, and concern ourselves with its care and feeding so it will be able to live up to its role in that world. That is the view of the Church, and it’s the natural view for people to take who haven’t been taught ideological demands or addled by commercial pop culture. Once that view is taken, the solution to current questions regarding sex and the family fall into place.

Marriage, and the families to which it gives rise, play a fundamental role in human life. They provide a setting that is uniquely suitable for bringing the new generation into the world. It is much harder for children to grow up well if they lack a stable family with a mother and a father. Families also care for the old, sick, and unfortunate. When they are weakened that care becomes more and more the responsibility of government, which is badly positioned to tailor its response to individual situations. The result is that some go unaided, while others are tempted by the rewards on offer, and there is a rise in the numbers claiming benefits that eventually makes the system unsustainable.

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