Marriage and history

I was reviewing blog posts and followed a link to this piece at the SF Chronicle: Prop. 8 judge makes strange charge".

What is the charge?

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that President Obama is a bigot. And not just the president. Joe Biden as well, and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sandra Day O'Connor. And maybe you, too.

The judge didn't put it that way, of course. Technically, he ruled that an amendment to California's Constitution violated the U.S. Constitution by defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

He goes on to talk about the history of marriage...

This was a strange ruling. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1971 that an identical challenge to the traditional definition of marriage was meritless. Nor has the Supreme Court ever suggested that its 1971 decision was wrong. Wednesday's ruling relied primarily on a constitutional doctrine that forbids laws having no conceivable rational purpose or no purpose except to oppress a politically unpopular minority group. After a lengthy trial, the judge found that the people of California must have adopted the traditional definition of marriage because of moral or religious contempt for homosexuals and their relationships.

It was a strange charge to make against the people of California. California has the most progressive domestic partnership law in the nation, which gives same-sex couples all the same substantive rights and privileges available to married couples. Why would the judge think that the only possible reason for favoring the traditional definition of marriage was bigotry? He reasoned that every other possible explanation for the voters' decision was so ridiculous that only anti-gay feelings were left.

Until very recently, same-sex marriage was unknown in human history, and it is opposed today by many progressive leaders, like Obama and Clinton. Can this be explained only by irrational prejudice or religious zeal? No. Only unions between men and women are capable of producing offspring, and every civilization has recognized that responsible procreation is critical to its survival. After the desire for self-preservation, sexual passion is probably the most powerful drive in human nature. Heterosexual intercourse naturally produces children, sometimes unintentionally and only after nine months.

Without marriage, men often would be uncertain about paternity or indifferent to it. If left unchecked, many men would have little incentive to invest in the rearing of their offspring, and the ensuing irresponsibility would have made the development of civilization impossible.

The fundamental purpose of marriage is to encourage biological parents, especially fathers, to take responsibility for their children. Because this institution responds to a phenomenon uniquely created by heterosexual intercourse, the meaning of marriage has always been inseparable from the problem it addresses.

Homosexual relationships (and lots of others as well), have nothing to do with the purpose of marriage, which is why marriage does not extend to them. Constitutional doctrine requires only one conceivable rational reason for a law, and the traditional definition of marriage easily meets that test.

It's not just about whether homosexual love is inferior to heterosexual love, or whether homosexuals are to be denied their rights. Or even just about benefits. The benefits are a bribe to get people to settle down and raise families.

Of course, some will attack the messenger:

Nelson Lund is a professor at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Va. He has assisted in the representation of proponents of Proposition 8 in the case Perry vs. Schwarzenegger.