Marriage and Procreation: Bodily Union of Spouses

"Gay Marriage is Not a Civil Right," my earlier essay, generated quite a comment thread. As is always the case, the radical leftists visiting advanced a secular authoritarianism bereft of intelligence, nuance or reason. Sometimes they just spew hatred.

One comment was particularly noteworthy, in response to the notion that marriage is an institution historically founded in the human pairing for procreation:

In America, marriage is not solely for reproduction. If it were, people who couldn't or didn't want to have children, wouldn't be allowed to get married.

In rebuttal, note Michael Novak's 2004 essay, which makes the unimpeachable case on the foundation of marriage in the togetherness of one man and one woman in an inseparable biological union, with the birth of a child from that unity the flesh-and-blood blessing of the couple's fertility:

Before male and female mate, they are two. But when they mate they become a biological unity, performing the only type of act that can result in the coming to be of a child, as a gift that flows from mutual self-giving by a man and a woman in the sexual expression of their marital oneness. The male and female who were two become a reproductive unit. He alone cannot reproduce; she alone cannot reproduce; when the two become one flesh, they can. This bodily union of spouses is the foundation of the multi-level sharing of life that constitutes marriage ....

It is true that, quite often, children are the fruit of marital union. But not always. Compared to the number of individual acts of marital union, the number of children has always been proportionately smaller, even when families were typically much larger than today. But the purpose of marriage is the act of marital unity even if children do not result from it. That is why even those marriages that for one reason or another do not result in children - do not share in the blessings of fertility, the gift of God that children in fact are - may still fulfill the purpose of marriage through the consummation of the marital act. They exhibit the fulfillment of the natural, created order. They are honored for fulfilling the laws of nature and nature's God, and for exemplifying family love - even if, through no fault of their own, it is in their particular case fruitless. The biological-sexual unity that is the foundation of marriage has its meaning, value, and significance not simply as a means to procreation or any other good, but as an end in itself. By fulfilling the behavioral conditions of procreation - by becoming one flesh - spouses actualize the great good of marriage even in circumstances in which the nonbehavioral conditions of procreation cannot obtain, or happen not to. Homosexual conduct, no matter how loving, cannot aspire to the same.

Read the whole thing, "What Marriage Is."