Tough, and Uphill

The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals, edited by Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain (Spence, 316 pp., $29.95)

ONE flaw in the conservative response to the demand for homosexual “marriage” has been its tendency, at some levels of discourse, to proceed as though the logic justifying such unions were a new thing under the sun. The reality is that, over the past half-century, we have made sweeping and perhaps irreversible moves to divorce sex from procreation, and marriage from both. Gay marriage is little more than the finalization of that divorce. For a conservative, then, the question of marriage runs deeper than the crisis provoked by four judges in Massachusetts. What we should ask ourselves is whether we want-and what we might do-to restore the nexus that has traditionally existed between marriage, procreation, and sex.

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Jason Lee Steorts

Jason Lee Steorts is a former managing editor of National Review.

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Marriage

The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals, edited by Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain (Spence, 316 pp., $29.95)

ONE flaw in the conservative response to the demand for homosexual “marriage” has been its tendency, at some levels of discourse, to proceed as though the logic justifying such unions were a new thing under the sun. The reality is that, over the past half-century, we have made sweeping and perhaps irreversible moves to divorce sex from procreation, and marriage from both. Gay marriage is little more than the finalization of that divorce. For a conservative, then, the question of marriage runs deeper than the crisis provoked by four judges in Massachusetts. What we should ask ourselves is whether we want-and what we might do-to restore the nexus that has traditionally existed between marriage, procreation, and sex.