PrintFebruary 6, 2007
Defending marriage
The story of the Washington state ballot initiative to cancel heterosexual marriages if they don't produce children within three years has achieved wide visibility this morning. The idea of course is to respond to arguments that homosexual marriages are different because they are barren.
The point which escapes the folks at the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance, which doesn't appear to defend anything approaching the classic definition of marriage, is a very simple idea: potentiality.
Any marriage between a man and a woman has, fundamentally, biologically, the potential to produce a child. Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances which preclude this, or other times choice dismisses the potential. However, given a man and a woman and normal, unassisted biology, the potential to create human life is there. Period.
Any union between two human beings of the same sex has absolutely zero potential to create human life without outside assistance. Period.
Any attempt to reframe the debate on the definition of marriage is merely an attempt to circumvent these basic facts. Some things really are just that simple.
