Our People

Why the marriage-based family is best

St John’s Seminary, Boston

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
6 October 2004

Introduction
The year is 2024. The revolution is over. The legal and social understandings of marriage, family and sexuality have been stretched to a point unimagined only a few decades ago. There is a sexual free-for-all and rates of sexual activity are at an all-time high; courts and governments have held that even children have a right to sex without interference from parents or social workers;  some even advocate sex with domestic pets.  While sex rates are on the up-and-up, marriage rates have hit an all-time low, with fewer and fewer people marrying at all.  This is despite the fact that many jurisdictions now allow men to marry men, women to marry women,  transsexuals to marry people of either sex,  live people to marry dead people  and to have children with them.  No marriage need last more than a year, after which its extension is optional.  With serial polygamy widespread for so long, concurrent polygamy is coming.

It is 2024 and what Peter Berger called ‘the war against the family’ and Pat Buchanan dubbed ‘the suicide of the West’ have been consummated.  Despite all the varieties of marriage and the sheer quantity of sex, birth rates are in free fall, well below demographic replacement level.  Many of those now getting married decide from the beginning to have no children or at most one or two. Pregnancy rates remain surprisingly high, despite widespread sex-education, contraception and infertility. Abortion is what keeps down the birthrate and so no real brakes have been put on that practice for decades. Over-the-counter abortifacients have successfully blurred the line between contraception and abortion, and have helped hide the real abortion rate.  Those who do have children often do so as a kind of life-style project, and then only with the aid of considerable technology, first to avoid and later to achieve conception, as well as to quality test along the way.  It is increasingly rare for children, once born, to grow up with both their parents married to each other and living in the same home as them. All in all, marriage and family as they were known in former times are disappearing.

Will 2024 really be like that? I don’t know: what I do know is that 2004 already is. We are now forced to rethink and rearticulate the case for marriage and the marriage-based family against the background of a culture that is no longer even sure what these things are, let alone whether it wants them and is willing to give them state protection and support. When we do this hard thinking and talking, we are portrayed as fundamentalists and enemies of anyone who does not fit in to the Little House on the Prairie. Yet I believe we can make a reasoned case for marriage and family as traditionally understood, without demeaning other friendships or people. We may also be charged with idealising heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family and running down everyone else: but we need not and do not pretend that all married people make good spouses and parents or that all unmarried people make bad friends or parents. We may be accused of denying the heroism of people who support children without the aid of a spouse or who struggle against inclination to live according to God’s plan for the human person, sexuality, marriage and the family: but the Church has long been in the forefront of helping just such people and opposing all unjust discrimination. 

When Christians deny that same-sex relationships are equivalent to marital ones, or that homosexual acts are equivalent to conjugal ones, or that the manufacture of laboratory children for single or same-sex parents is equivalent to procreation through genuinely marital acts, or that the state should recognise, privilege or support all these relationships or activities equally, we are not discriminating unjustly: we are recognizing relevant differences. And when we argue, as I will do tonight, for the marriage-based family as worthy of special state protection and support, we are ‘speaking the truth in love’ (Eph 4:15), not lying or hating or standing mute while our civilisation crumbles.
 
How did we get here?
Marriage and the family have over the past four decades been the subjects of radical social experimentation, led and fed by four revolutions:

• Stage 1 was the sex-on-demand revolution of the 1960s in which the me-generation denied that sex has any intrinsic meaning or limits, let alone a marital significance. With the rapid adoption of a contraceptive-abortion mentality and practice, the West was able to sustain a copulation explosion at the same time as a population implosion. This denied even Christians the traditional boundary notions that ‘sex is for marriage’ and ‘marriage is for family’.
  
• Stage 2 was the divorce-on-demand revolution of the hedonistic ’70s which cast to the wind the notion of life-long commitments and the attendant self-sacrifice, except as a sentimental ideal for the newlywed or the religious. From the 1970s the divorce rate in Western countries spiralled, robbing spouses and children of the experience of permanence and even Christians of the ‘for life’ horizon for marriage and family.
  
• Stage 3 was the children-on-demand revolution of the 1980s which built on the contraceptive-abortion mentality of the previous two decades and now saw the laboratory manufacture and quality-testing of children as if they were commodities. No longer need there be any connection between children and marriage, or even with marital acts. Both fertility and infertility technologies were now used not merely to space children but also to prevent them altogether for a new generation of ‘DINKs’. Paul VI’s 1968 prophesy of a radical break between love-making and life-making, sex and children, came to its fulfilment as even Christians were denied a sense of the mystery and givenness of fertility and children.
  
• Stage 4 is the ‘marriage’-and-‘family’-on-demand revolution which began even before the 1990s with the recognition of ‘de facto’ marriages in law. From the ’90s other relationships such as same-sex ones have increasingly been put on an equal footing with and even called marriage, and various domestic arrangements have been equated with the marriage-based family in law and society. Everyone has a ‘right’ to marry, and to marry whomever they wish, without being bound to any expectations such as heterosexuality, openness to children or permanence; everyone has a right to manufacture a family by whatever means and with whomever they please. The notions of marriage and family are being expanded to the point of triviality. This has robbed even many Christians of a coherent understanding of what marriage and family are and of the special treatment their marriages and families deserve.

These several developments are much more radical than they seem to us because, like kangaroos hypnotised by oncoming car headlights, we often fail to notice what is happening until it is too late for us to protest, let alone hop out of the way! All four revolutions continue to unfold themselves and feed each other and, in the process, contribute to the breakdown of many marriages and families.

Recent rewriting of history by activists notwithstanding, ‘marriage’ has almost always been understood as the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life whereby they undertake to live sexually and otherwise as husband and wife with a view to family. 
 
Despite cultural variations, ‘family’ has consistently meant a community of two or more generations related by blood, law and affections, based on marriage and sharing a domestic life. 

The desire of many people who do not fit this traditional understanding of marriage and family to share in those titles and attendant privileges might be thought to represent a kind of reverence for traditional marriage and family. Yet as I will argue tonight, far from honouring marriage and family, mimicking them and extending their benefits to others only adds to the widespread confusion about what marriage and family are, dilutes further the precious little marriage-specific support there is, and threatens what are already fragile institutions. There are, as I will suggest, very good reasons for thinking that the marriage-based family is the best domestic arrangement for most individuals and for every society, and that it is worthy of special protection and promotion by law and social policy.

Marriage is the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life whereby they undertake to live sexually and otherwise as husband and wife
When Catholics talk about a ‘vocations crisis’ they usually mean the acute shortage of new priestly and religious vocations in the Western world. Yet arguably there is an even worse vocations crisis: the crisis in marriage. Fewer and fewer people get married at all and of those who do, fewer stay married. The marital breakdown rate and divorce rate are now so high in the West that it has raised in some theologians’ minds the possibility that for the first time in history a significant proportion of the population cannot validly marry. The reason: because in their heart of hearts they believe that marriage is only for as long as it ‘works’. The divorce option is now so deeply ingrained in us that it is hard for any young person today to engage in the sort of total self-giving that marriage requires. Divorce, the ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, can always be played if needs be. In the meantime years of ‘living together’ and other experiences have habituated would-be spouses in a debilitating non-commitment.  So Briteney Spears can be married twice (or is it three times?) in one year and imagine she means it each time.

It is not that people are selfish, precisely, though many no doubt are. Rather it is that in our culture nothing is forever, nothing for keeps any more, whether that is relationships, work, housing, causes, beliefs, morals. All is transient, revisable, renegotiable. Paradoxically we maintain the hope for life-long near-perfect relationships, though without compromise of anyone’s will and without total commitment on either side. If marriage, family, priesthood and consecrated life are to have a future, we must sacrifice some Western autonomania and learn again how to commit, for life, heart and soul, persevering even when the going gets tough, even when the warm feelings are missing. We must rediscover what it means “to love, honour and obey till death do us part”.

On the classical account marriage is not only for life but also for a man and a woman, i.e. two people (not one or three or more), of adult age (that is, rational, sexually mature beings able to commit to and live a marriage), who are free to marry, of opposite sex, and both alive and consenting at the time. Those who argue for same-sex marriage (as has been permitted in some parts of Northern Europe and North America, including this jurisdiction ), marriage to a corpse (as has been permitted in France ), and other exotic variants, either do not understand marriage or do not understand other relationships. Not all friendships are marriage and not all people are marriageable. Homogenising marital and non-marital friendships devalues both, trying to force the non-marital into a marital mould and vice versa, and creating inappropriate expectations on both sides. But children apart, what is the relevance to spouses and so in turn to the community that they are of opposite sex?

First, on any sound anthropology of the sexes there are real differences between men and women. Much has been said about this throughout the history of law and politics, science and the arts, psychology and sociology. Despite the confusions of the contemporary world, most freudians, feminists and pop writers on men being Martians and women Venetians, agree that there are essential differences between men and women, and that these go beyond genitalia. In theology this point has been richly developed by the current pontiff whose deep insights into the theology of the body have spawned a whole industry.  Now if these many traditions are right about the essential differences between the sexes, marriage presents a unique challenge to human beings: to deal with the otherness of a spouse whose sexuality one will never fully understand. Only the male-female relationship allows the discovery and expression of both the similarities and the differences, especially the complementarities, of temperaments and rôles of both sexes in that relationship. Same-sex couples commit instead to someone more like another self, psychosexually speaking. This has important social consequences for the understanding and relationship between the sexes.

Secondly, marriage and family life generally require both husband and wife to give up much of their same sex world (e.g. ‘going out with the boys’) for the sake of their new family; cohabitors more often continue as before. Only genuine marriage (and family) seems to have the power to draw forth that kind of self-sacrificial commitment told in the way marriage and family change all the relationships that the couple had individually with others before the marriage.

Thirdly, marriage is a place where the ‘eros’ of the two is tamed, enriched and directed to the service of vocation and the common good, and where human life and love will most easily be understood as ‘gifts’ or trusts received rather than ‘projects’ chosen. There we learn to be spouses and parents, children and siblings, and to subordinate sexual and other desires to the common good of the marriage and the family.

Fourthly, marriage is a school of intimacy and community for persons of opposite sex. In the contemporary world ‘intimates’ have been reduced to ‘partners’—with all the impersonality this business terminology suggests—or to short-term ‘compatibles’, meaning: “I take you on my terms”. What Pope John Paul II, on the other hand, has dubbed ‘the nuptial gift of the self’, promotes certain crucial values such as decisiveness, fidelity, generosity, trust, hope and forgiveness; other relationships are unlikely to cultivate such virtues so effectively and may even encourage contrary vices. The loss of this primal experience of community and of this school for certain virtues is potentially very damaging not just for the spouses and their families, but also for society. It is very difficult to ‘build community’ with people who have never been schooled in the qualities of character it requires or where their most fundamental relationships have been reduced to autonomy, compatibility and contract.

Fifthly, marriage is the place where the rôles of husband and wife are learnt and enacted. Yet it is more difficult in 2004 than at any time in history to write the job description for a ‘husband’ or a ‘wife’. To the extent that there are real differences between the sexes there will be real differences in the ways they espouse and in turn the ways they parent. It would be naïve to imagine that the rôles of both husband and wife (and so of father and mother) are entirely interchangeable or can readily be performed by persons of either sex without loss to themselves or others, or without very considerable supplementation.

Marriage is good for the spouses themselves
Philosophers have identified marriage (and the marriage-based family) as one of the basic goods of human flourishing.  It is the purpose (or end or for-the-sake-of) which explains an enormous range of human choices, activities, commitments, institutions and policies. Marriage is self-evidently and intrinsically choice-worthy: no further explanation is needed as to why people do many of the things that they do than that it is ‘for the sake of their marriage’, their spouse, their family, or someone else’s, or the very institutions themselves. Marriage is something we enjoy ‘for its own sake’, irreducible to other goods or ends, even if it is also a means to other goods such as friendship and life, work and leisure. That marriage is a good of human beings is something ‘given’ in our nature rather than merely a preference of individuals or communities. It is an aspect of every person’s flourishing—even those who are unmarried—and one of that range of goods in which everyone seeks to participate, within the confines of their own nature, circumstances and commitments. Most people find their vocation and happiness in being married, thereby making it a central life commitment, the goal of many of their day-to-day choices, and the structuring principle of their identity or ‘narrative unity’. Any life-course so crucial to individual fulfilment will of course also be essential to the common good and any community worth the name will enable and support such a course of life to come to fruition.

To say that marriage (and the marriage-based family) is a basic human good is not to say that participation in it is reasonably to be pursued by everybody, at all times, by whatever means. If that were so, nuns would be required to jump the convent walls, the monogamous to try polygamy, and everyone to have as many children as physically possible. But some means of participating in marriage and family are unreasonable (such as adulterous seduction or abduction or IVF); and there are other important values which might preclude marriage and family for a particular person. Marriage does not trump all other goods in our choices. So while there is always a good reason to pursue marriage and family, whether for ourselves or for others, there may well concurrently be good reasons not to do so, such as our other proper goals or responsibilities.

Of course there are many ways of participating in the good of marriage. As a son of good parents, a sibling and uncle, and a friend of many married people, I have personally benefited enormously from participating in the good of (other peoples’) marriages. As a consecrated celibate and priest I continue to do so by preparing people for marriage, both remotely and proximately, by celebrating their marriages liturgically and assisting them thereafter with counselling and other support, by preaching, teaching and lobbying about marriage and the family, by mediating for the married at the altar of God and in the rest of my prayer-life, and by being invited by them to share in their family lives in various ways. Yet I will never be married myself, except in the spiritual sense of being, as a Christian, part of Christ’s bride the Church; in the sense of being, as a priest, one who acts in persona Christi as a husband to that bride and father to her children; and in the sense of being, as a religious, an eschatological sign of the ultimate marriage—that of the Lamb, at the consummation of all things. But I am not literally married, and that could be instructive to those who think the only way to dignify a state in life is to call it marriage or that the only way to honour a person is to call them married.

There is much more that could be said philosophically and theologically about why marriage is good for people and what the implications of this are for personal morality and public policy. There is also a huge weight of sociological evidence on the importance of marriage for home-building and for the fulfilment of the spouses. Put simply it says: married people are generally healthier and happier than their divorced, never-married, cohabiting or same-sex counterparts.  They live longer and better; they are less likely to engage in “problem drinking” or other high risk behaviours, and more likely to engage in responsible, healthy behaviours; they are less likely to experience sexual dysfunction or STDs and are more likely to be sexually satisfied; they have lower rates of depression and other psychological and psychiatric disorders, and cope better with stressful events;

they are more socially productive and less alienated from their work; they have lower rates of suicide and fatal accidents; they are more likely to invest emotionally in their relationships and develop partner-specific relational skills; they are on average more physically, emotionally and spiritually satisfied; and they report that marriage gives their life a sense of meaning and purpose. There is no evidence that pseudo-marriages yield all these public and private benefits.
The future of marriage and the family will crucially depend upon a continuing clear understanding of marriage as an exclusive and life-long commitment of a man and a woman to live sexually and otherwise as husband and wife. To extend the notion of marriage as the state of Massachusetts has done by excluding one or more of these elements is to risk (further) undermining personal and social conceptions of this relationship and destabilising existing marriages. Put baldly: if everyone is married, no-one is. Given the importance of real marriage for the spouses themselves and the public goods this yields not just for their families but for the whole society, any state policy which weakens real marriage threatens the rationale and stability of the state itself.