In a brave new book, Anthony Esolen describes the very real consequences of redefining marriage.

The beauty of the country of marriage

by Matthew J. Franck

MercatorNet recently republished a very important essay titled “Breaking the Silence,” in which Janna Darnelle wrote with heartbreaking candor of what she and her children have suffered since her ex-husband abandoned their marriage, married another man under state law, and obtained joint custody of their children.

When Darnelle’s essay was published, I had just finished reading Anthony Esolen’s new book Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity. As I read her essay, I realized that her story encapsulated nearly every one of the book’s arguments.

Anthony Esolen is well-known to readers of MercatorNet and Public Discourse, and his writings adorn many other websites and publications. He teaches literature at Providence College, has translated Dante’s Divine Comedy and other medieval works, and writes with a master’s ease of Shakespeare, Spenser, Tolkien, Orwell, and other authors in this book. And he writes with exceptional beauty, in prose both simple and elegant.

Esolen’s limpid style, the fine clarity of his moral reasoning, and his passionate devotion to the essential goodness of marriage and the family give his twelve arguments tremendous persuasive force.

Yet it would be easy for even sympathetic readers of Esolen’s book to come away unpersuaded, if they talk themselves into believing that his arguments are purely speculative. The institution of marriage is already gravely damaged, thanks to unilateral “no-fault” divorce, the contraceptive mentality and the abortion culture, and the advance of the promiscuous “hook-up” culture. The full impact of the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples has not yet been felt, because the campaign to persuade the Supreme Court to foist it on the whole country has yet to succeed (though recently the Court took an unfortunate step in that direction).

So it is still possible to lull oneself into believing that the final destruction and remaking of marriage won’t do much harm to people who remain devoted to the truth about what marriage really is.

Janna Darnelle’s story should be enough to wake anyone from the pleasant dream that all may still be well if same-sex marriage is nationalized. She is already living through some of the direst consequences of which Esolen warns. They happened to her and her family in the most immediate way, but those consequences await us all.

The consequences of marriage redefinition

First, as Esolen shows, the redefinition of marriage means the establishment of the sexual revolution as the nomos, the law of the place, in our culture and polity. All of “mankind’s long history of meditation on the difficulties of love,” in this new order of the ages, is “consigned to oblivion,” and replaced with the principle that sexual gratification is its own justification. Chastity, purity, modesty, and the demand that we honor these qualities in one another—all these become impossible to uphold.

As the late William F. Buckley, Jr. was fond of saying, “Who says A must say B.” He who says that a man can marry a man, or a woman marry a woman, says that our law and culture will honor and uphold partnerships in which fidelity, permanence, and devotion to the bearing and rearing of children are no essential feature of the relationship between the partners. He who says that is a “marriage” necessarily says that chastity is no longer intelligible as a moral norm binding on anyone. As Esolen puts it, “you cannot say to John and Mary, ‘You two must wait till marriage,’ while saying to Alan and Steve, ‘You two can go right ahead.’ What can chastity or purity even mean, once you have smiled at sodomy?”

Who says A must say B. Those who choose this defenestration of chastity necessarily obliterate every moral alternative to the “radically individualistic” view that “our sexual powers are for ourselves alone.” This in turn promises the estrangement of young men and young women from each other. They may bring their bodies together, but their souls will remain apart. “The sexual revolution is essentially a lonely one. . . . Loneliness is its brick and mortar.” In this moral wasteland, how do girls and boys learn what it means to be women and men?

The fallout from the destruction and redefinition of marriage spreads still more widely, even beyond the immediate territory of the family. Deep friendship between members of the same sex is now in grave danger. To show us why, Esolen asks us to imagine a world in which the incest taboo is erased (and that is a world that may not be far off). In such a place, “You see a father hugging his teenage daughter as she leaves the car to go to school. The possibility flashes before your mind. The language has changed, and the individual can do nothing about it.”

So too, in the world that is rapidly embracing and recognizing homosexual relationships as normal and normative, the space for deep and meaningful male-male or female-female friendships among the young is rapidly shrinking to the vanishing point. “The stigma against sodomy,” Esolen rightly notes, “cleared away ample space for an emotionally powerful friendship that did not involve sexual intercourse, exactly as the stigma against incest allows for the physical and emotional freedom of a family.”

Add, then, the estrangement of boys from boys and girls from girls, in a world in which intimacy always raises the suspicion of sexual desire. This is a bleak horizon to contemplate: plenty of sex, mostly empty and unrewarding, with much less love and friendship. Where do we go to get our taboos back?


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