Should Conservatives Favor Same-Sex Marriage?

April 15, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

2:45 p.m.	Registration
3:00	Presenter:	Jonathan Rauch, National Journal and the Brookings Institution
	Discussion:	Michael Novak, AEI
		Charles Murray, AEI
	Moderator:	Christopher DeMuth, AEI
5:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:
MR. DeMUTH:  [In progress.]  The centerpiece of our conversation this afternoon is a splendid new book by Jonathan Rauch, "Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America," just published by Times Books.

Let me say at the outset that this is the finest book that has been written on the subject.  It may be the only book that has been written on the subject.

[Laughter.]

MR. DeMUTH:  Andrew Sullivan wrote a book about 8 or 9 years ago called, "Virtually Normal," that touched upon several of the arguments of this book, but it was in a different context.  The arguments have, and the issue, have developed very substantially in the years since, and the book that Jonathan has written is such a wonderfully lucid piece of analysis and argumentation.  It, first of all, is beautifully written, but I want to say more than that.  It is a powerfully argued book, which reflects not merely the author's writing skills, but the fact that he has thought these issues through at such a thorough and deep level.

And it is, finally, not simply a tour de raison.  It is on a highly emotional subject not merely very appealing to reason and very cogent at  the level of reason.  It is also a very moving book.

There has been I think in the last couple of months a higher level of debate on these issues which I think a couple of years ago most people simply wanted to go away.  And I think that Jonathan's contributions, most importantly, as reflected in this book, probably plays a much more important role in elevating the level of debate on these issues than he himself, a modest man, would be willing to accept.

The discussion at the panel here this afternoon is not a debate.  We're not trying to score debating points.  We're not going to take a vote of the house, and it is not on or at least not centrally on the issues that have preoccupied newspaper stories and political figures in the months since the Massachusetts court decision, and the various efforts to stage gay marriage ceremonies in certain vocal political jurisdictions which have focused on the legal and constitutional issues.

I believe that all three of the panelists are going to want to clear away the constitutional brush and assume that free people were capable of making this decision in a democratic manner, at the level of state legislatures, and the issue is whether gay marriage should be adopted as a democratic matter by the political organs of our government.

Jonathan will begin with a presentation based upon the arguments of his book.  Jonathan is a writer in residence at the Brookings Institution, where he writes a biweekly column for the National Journal that comes as close to required reading in Washington for anybody in this town that wants to maintain sanity, as there is.  He's also a contributing editor--is that the right term--for the Atlantic; is that right?  And in a previous incarnation, he was at the American Enterprise Institute, where he was a fellow for several years and wrote an early and wonderful book titled, "Kindly Inquisitors."

After he speaks, I'm going to call first on Michael Novak, who is a Jewett Scholar in Religion, Politics, Philosophy and Public Policy at AEI, and then Charles Murray, who is AEI's Brady Fellow, for their comments.  We will have some discussion up here in the front, and then we will open the floor for a discussion among everyone here.

Jonathan, if you'll begin, please.

MR. RAUCH:  Chris, thank you very much for that generous introduction.  As you say, I'm an utterly modest person.  In fact, exemplary in my modesty, and as a result, I cannot acknowledge that any of the nice things you said about my personally are true, but I can certainly attest that all of the nice things you said about my book are true.

[Laughter.]

MR. RAUCH:  And that if you like the movie today, I hope that at least some of you will investigate the book.

This is one of the first occasions I'll have in what'll be a book tour to talk about this subject, but in a way this for me is the most special because I cut my teeth here at AEI.  It was my first think tank appointment, though I'm now over at Brookings.  And I learned so much from so many of the leading lights of conservatism, some of whom are in this room.  Walter Berns is here, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and many who I've come to know since then.

And this is a chance for me to address myself, in particular, to conservatives and centrists who are thinking about same-sex marriage.  And it's to that specific audience, the people in this room and people watching in the larger world, that I'd like to address myself.

The official topic today is: Should conservatives support same-sex marriage?  The unofficial subtitle, at least in my talk, is: Everything I know About Gay Marriage, I Learned at the American Enterprise Institute.

[Laughter.]

MR. RAUCH:  Too many people on the right are panicking instead of thinking when it comes to same-sex marriage.  The president of the United States, unfortunately, is someone I put in that category.  But it seems to me that if you apply the kinds of principles that I think I learned here at AEI, and which folks like Chris DeMuth have done so much to proselytize for over the last 20 years, I think your reach two conclusions or at least I do:

The first is that same-sex marriage is an idea that conservatives ought to like, and the second is that even if you don't agree with me about the first, that a total ban, a total national ban on same-sex marriage, which is what the president, among others, are advocating, is an approach conservatives should dislike.

The book is largely about the reason same-sex marriage is what I call the "trifecta of modern American social policy," a win, and a win, and a win: good for gays, good for communities around them, that is to say, the straight world, and above all, good for marriage.  Because that's most of what we'll be discussing in the panel, I'll just give you about two minutes' worth on that.

Gay people, of course, gay couples get the legal protections of marriage, if gay marriage is enacted, but that's hardly the most of it.  They also get a richer love, a destination for love, which kicks in whether you ultimately get married or not--the knowledge that the first kiss, the first date, the first going steady can end in love, and they get the enormous personal benefits, which marriage alone conveys.  Married people are healthier, they are happier, they are more prosperous, more secure, less drugs, less crime, less instability.  They even live longer.  Those are things to which I believe gay citizens ought to have access, and in all those ways will benefit from integration into the culture of marriage.

The straight world gets the additional stability that comes when you knit people into family, which is what marriage uniquely does--it creates family.  I have a cousin right now, who's 60 years old, married, suffering from cancer.  Her husband is keeping her alive through difficult chemo, not just caring for her physically, but caring for her emotionally.  And if he weren't there, charity, welfare, the kids live far away.  They do their best.  But there's no substitute for the love and care of a spouse.  That's a nonprocreative marriage, but no one I think can reasonably say that society has no stake in that marriage.

Above all, I think marriage is a likely beneficiary of same-sex marriage, but this is an opportunity to bolster the ethic of marriage and the culture of marriage at a time when society has been abandoning those things.  The fundamental principle here ought to be for all of society that sex, love and marriage go together automatically, that this is the preferred form of commitment, that what you want to see next door to you, if you're a straight family with kids and if a gay couple lives next door, you want to see them modeling the behavior of marriage, and that's good for your kids.  It's also good for their kids, by the way, if they have any.

This is a rare opportunity not to go down the slippery slope away from marriage, but back up the slope toward marriage at a time when heterosexuals are increasingly treating marriage as purely optional.  The problem today is not gay couples wanting to get married.  That is not the threat to marriage.  The threat to marriage is straight couples not wanting to get married or straight couples not staying married.

Same-sex marriage is potentially a dramatic statement that marriage, not cohabitation, not partnership, not anything else is the gold standard and the model to which all Americans should aspire, that it is special, that it is preferred, that everyone can expect to do it, and everybody should be expected to do it.  That doesn't mean they have to, but that this is a privileged and noble thing to do.

Here's a point conservatives should be able to understand and do in many other contexts.  There are a lot of trades in society that are win-win, and as in international trade and, indeed, most forms of voluntary exchange, this is, in my opinion, a win-win.  The premise that there must be a loser if gay marriage is adopted, in my view, is wrong, but of course I may be wrong about that, and of course there are often externalities, bad side effects from people who make voluntary arrangements, which are not in society's interests.

So, for the rest of this talk, I'd like to talk more specifically about what I think I learned at AEI about how conservatives should think and apply it to this issue.  We live, as any good conservative knows, in a very uncertain world.  We lack a lot of information.  We live in a world of unintended consequences.  The wisest person or person or committee in the world cannot get everything right and will often make unintended mistakes.

How do we make policy in that situation?  Well, modern conservatism, which I distinguish from the Paleo variety, which just says, "Stop the world.  I want to get off."  But modern conservatism, which folks like Chris DeMuth have pioneered, has developed some important principles for how you think about how you make policy, how you make decisions in an uncertain and surprising world.  I'll name three of them:

Principle No. 1, every individual counts.  Favor a policy that never loses sight of the individuals at the bottom.  That doesn't mean you consider only individual welfare, but you must consider it, and you must reject crude utilitarianism which simply sees individuals as means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves.

Conservatives are, of course, the first to object to a kind of collectivism that relegates the individual to insignificance.  If you would not confiscate someone's income, for example, for the common good, why confiscate their marriage?  How many of you would give up if you're married?  How many of you would give up your marriage to make someone else's family stronger?  I'll bet not very much.  And if you're not married, how many of you would give up the opportunity to get married to make someone else's family stronger?

One of the prominent conservative commentators on this issue, Maggie Gallagher, has written as follows.  "Will same-sex marriage strengthen or weaken marriage as a social institution?  If the answer is that it would weaken marriage at all, we should not do it.  If it would weaken marriage at all, we should not do it."

What's missing in that sentence are the enormous benefits that marriage can bring to 10 or 15 million homosexual Americans who are now locked out of the culture of marriage.  Marriage, as I said, makes you happier, wealthier, all of those other goods.  Living without marriage, not only today, but growing up without the hope and prospect of marriage in your future is a severe hardship.

Now, it is true we have to balance social costs against individual benefits.  I don't deny that for a moment.  That's why we have securities laws.  People will do things that are good for themselves and bad for society.

All I'm asking for here, however, is to recognize that Gallagher's way of looking at it, which is all too common on the right, cannot be the correct answer.  It cannot be right to say that all of the good in the world that is done to 10 to 15 million gay people doesn't count at all against any harm that might happen to nongay people.  That, it seems to me, is not recognizing the stake and the value of gay lives.

Second principle that I think I learned at AEI: respect market forces.  How many times have I heard conservatives criticize liberals for mistaking the intention for the deed?  Campaign finance regulation, gun controls, energy price controls, many others, conservatives rightly remind us, again and again, that banning doesn't stop change.  It just distorts the channels through which change runs.  It often has unintended consequences, and just saying that you want to make something scarcer or less of it doesn't make regulating or banning it the right answer.

Exactly the same thing applies to same-sex marriage, in my opinion, but here the forces at issue are social market forces.  They're arrangements that people are making in their personal lives, in their social lives, and these forces can be managed, and should be managed, but they cannot be simply stopped.

Friends, the river of history has turned.  Same-sex couples are here for good.  They're not going to go away and hide.  As the sloganeers said, we're here, we're queer, get used to it.  And recognition will increasingly follow these committed relationships into whatever vehicle or vessel they flow.  Society has an interest in recognizing the nobility of the commitment these couples are making.

And a ban won't stop recognition from flowing to these couples.  What it will do is just shut marriage out of a new market.  It'll say this new market, this new demand, can have anything except marriage and, of course, if the demand cannot be meet by marriage, it'll be met by something else.

Well, what would that something else be?  Assuming I'm right, that you can't stop change, that you've got to live with it and channel it, that leads to the third principle that I think I learned at the American Enterprise Institute, and that's manage risk rationally--manage risk rationally.

Suppose somebody says something like welfare reform or biotechnology or education vouchers or Medicare vouchers are a terrible idea, a dangerous idea and, in fact, so dangerous they should never, ever be tried.  That's what's known as the extreme version of the precautionary principle.  These days it's heard primarily on the left, not on the right.  For example, in the context of biotech, where people will say it should not be allowed at all until it can be proven 100-percent safe.

Well, of course, modern conservatives and modern centrists understand the precautionary principle not to be conservative at all.  It is, in fact, radical because it looks only at the risks on one side of the equation and not at the risks of what happens if you prevent something like biotechnology from coming to the market or if you never experiment with education reform.  It's very important to recognize that there are risks on both sides of the equation with same-sex marriage.

There is a significant downside potential of denying same-sex marriage, something I believe the American conservative movement has not come to  grips with.

The first kind of risk is the risk--I'd call it almost a certainty, not really a risk in that sense at all--the risk of creating and subsidizing alternatives to marriage--civil unions, as they're called or various forms of domestic partnerships--but various nonmarriages that will be legally and socially sanctioned, and will in many cases offer a halfway house between nonmarriage and marriage that will, in many cases, depending how they're designed, offer the benefits of marriage without the responsibilities, the rights without the obligations, to some extent.

Many of these, politics in a majoritarian society being what they are, will be open to heterosexuals, if not immediately, than over time. And in fact in the domestic partner programs in this country--corporate and state and local--the majority of those are open to opposite-sex couples, and opposite sex couples are often the majority of users of them.

Even if these alternatives to marriage are not opened to heterosexuals, their existence will validate the impression that marriage is just one of a lot of relationship lifestyles, one of a lot of things you can do if you're in a committed partnership.  They will erode the special status that marriage enjoys.

Refusing even civil unions programs or other halfway houses, as often mentioned, is an alternative.  Okay.  No, gay marriage, no civil unions, no nothing.  Friends, that's even worse, because that means that the vessel into which gay commitment will flow will be cohabitation.  Every successful public gay couple will be an advertisement for the joys of life, out of wedlock, out of matrimony, out of legal structures, and of course there is nothing that can possibly prevent straight people from cohabiting.

Why would conservatives want to turn gay couples into advertisements for cohabitation?  It beats me.  Not a good idea.

Finally, a second very important downside risk, which is that banning gay marriage outright, saying not here, not anywhere, not ever, risks marginalizing marriage by defining it over time in the public mind as the discriminatory lifestyle.

It seems very farfetched now, but when I was born, in 1960, it seemed farfetched to say that men would shun clubs that discriminate against women, and a lot of clubs continue to discriminate against women, assuming that they could always do that.  Well, of course, now, men-only clubs are rare, they're increasingly marginal in society, and most men wouldn't join one.

Already, today, in Benton County, Oregon, that county has been refusing to grant marriage licenses to anybody on the grounds that it will not participate in a discriminatory institution.  I believe, over time, as the consensus moves in a direction toward equality, social and legal, toward homosexuality--and I think that is how it's going--there is a serious risk that marriage will be marginalized and pushed to the edge of American society if it's demarcated legally as how you discriminate.

Bottom line, this is something very familiar at AEI, a risk-risk situation, risk versus risk, changes versus change, not risk versus safety or change versus no change.  We have individuals that have a need to fill social markets that are going to serve that need one way or the other and risks on both sides of the equation.

What do you in a case like that?  We're fortunate that we live in a country which is ideally suited to tackle this kind of problem.  The United States of America, which has a Federalist system in which marriage is traditionally within the boundaries of state law, clearly, it seems to me, the conservative solution to this issue is to try state same-sex marriage in a state or a couple of states that are ready to have it and find out how it works, see what happens.  See if the world ends.  I don't think the world will end.  I think it will prove successful and spread for that reason.  But that way we'll get some real sense of what we're doing without imposing a single policy on the whole country.

On conservative principles, it seems to me, even if I'm wrong, in my view, that same-sex marriage is an opportunity to shore up the institution of marriage, flatly banning it, it seems to me, cannot possibly be the right answer.   I regret to say this, but some of my conservative friends sound, on gay marriage, the way the National Education Association sounds on school vouchers--unwilling to concede any need for any change, averting their eyes from the plight of the unserved and the misserved, insisting that reform can only entail hazards and no benefits, insisting that even one experiment anywhere ever is too many, and unwilling to offer alternatives other than wishing the whole issue would go away.

My challenge to conservatives today is end the gay marriage exception and think like conservatives at the American Enterprise Institute.

[Applause.]

MR. DeMUTH:  Jonathan, thank you very much.

Michael Novak, please.

MR. NOVAK:  Thanks.  Right off the bat, I want to say how much I admire Jonathan's clear intelligence I approaching this difficult issue,  his great calmness in argument, his sweetness of temper, the conservative temperament that informs all of his work.

I love the way he smiles during his minor premise just before the slash of his conclusion, to which his logic had been slyly building up all along.  Jonathan is very kind in victory, he's extremely good intellectual company, a perfect companion in conversation.  The same qualities of mine are present in this book, and I've been instructed to show it to the camera every chance that I get.

[Laughter.]

MR. NOVAK:  So, "Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good For Straights and Good for America."  The same qualities of mine, as I say, are present in this book, well, nearly always.  At one or two points, he does let his anger show.  I greatly appreciate Jonathan's attempt to persuade us that marriage for gays is good for marriage.

Even when he talks about the subject over dinner, he exudes the becoming lure of common sense.  I remember telling him once that I agree, it is only common sense that it is better for gays to settle into permanent relationships than to have multiple partners, but I wasn't willing, I said, to call such a relationship a marriage.  He seemed very happy to have gotten from me as much as he had.

Now, actually, Jonathan has a passage in his book that sharply reminds me of our dinner discussion.  Here's what he wrote: "Not along ago I had dinner with a friend who is a devout Christian.  He has a heart of gold, knows and likes gay people, and is warm to the idea of civil unions.  But when I asked him about gay marriage, he replied with a firm, `No.'

"I asked him if he'd imagined there was anything I could say that might budge him.  He thought for a moment and then said, `No,' again.

"`Why?'"

"`Because,' he said, `male-female marriage is a sacrament from God.  It predates the Constitution and every other law of man.  We could not, in that sense, change it, even if we wanted to.'

"I asked if it might alter his conclusion to reflect that legal marriage is a secular institution, that the separation of church and state requires us to distinguish God's law from civil law and that we must refrain from using law to impose one group's religious precepts on the rest of society.  He shook his head.  `No,' he said.  This is bigger than that.'"

Jonathan continues, "I felt he had not answered my argument.  His God is not mine, and in a secular country, law can and should be influenced by religious teachings, but must not enforce them."

And here comes one of Jonathan's most attractive virtues into play.  "Yet, really," he writes, "it was I who had not answered his argument in some deeper way.  Precisely because legal marriage is a secular institution, I have had little to say in this book about the role of religion invalidating marriage.  To many readers, that must seem odd."

As I say, it's one of the most endearing qualities of Jonathan that he gives you the point you're thinking of just as you're thinking of it and let's it sit there for a moment before he pulls it away.

But, anyway, let me take a stab at what the person with whom Jonathan had that conversation may have been thinking.  I will have to speak telegraphically because, in these matters, not everything can be said--well, not at least until the conversationalists have shared about a case of cognac together, which takes a lot of leisurely dinners and longish evenings.

In one way, the problem is the nature of the different religions Jonathan and I share.  I think he would define his as a kind of secular humanism, although in this book he tries to blow a strike by us with a wicked slider, that his view is not a religion, just a secular view, as secular as the law.

The case of marriage shows that that cannot be so.  Jonathan's views of marriage is not empirical, as he himself admits on that very page.  It's not the way marriages actually are in this country.  There are enough steps beyond mere reason, in his view, in short, for the Supreme Court to hold it to be a competitive religion.

In the real world, I mean the world of the United States, most reasonable persons do not argue merely from the form of reason favored by secular humanism.  Their reason is informed by religion; that is to say, by a very long narrative, with a rich symbolic treasury, a very complex discursive history, a tradition of centuries' long argument and respect for the boundaries of what cannot be said.

To be more direct, we are mostly Christians and Jews of various traditions in each lineage, and we think we have fuller and more reasonable views of many human matters than secular humanists provide.  In our history, we have had long-running arguments with atheists and agnostics, much to our benefit, and learn from an astonishing variety of diverse cultures, religions, philosophies and human practices and institutions.

That is a serious problem with Jonathan's project.  He wishes to conduct his argument in the terms of secular, modern reason, but most of us do not, in fact, think in those terms.  In the elites and the communications media, yes, but not I think most people.  We remain conscious of the ancient narrative structures that long inform the common law, the tacit traditions of Anglo-American peoples and the originating conceptual content and background images of our most basic and well-worn ethical terms.

These narratives and traditions grew up intertwined with Jewish and Christian materials over many long centuries, long before Blackstone and others tried to distill them into legal definitions, rules and precedents.  Marriage, as Jonathan very well notes, was not invented by modern secular philosophy.  Marriage was not invented by contemporary science.  It certainly was not invented by four Supreme Court justices in Massachusetts, who aspire, it would seen, to government of the people, by the people and for the people and by the four.

Although the 50 American states regulate the legal standing of marriages in most cases, as Jonathan generally notes, marriages are presided over by church authorities, not state authorities.  Moreover, the understanding of what marriage is, is, on the one hand, left by the states to the contracting parties and to the presiding churches and, on the other hand, even if it's the barest legal minimum, deeply influenced by the long traditions of Judaism and Christianity.

On matters such as polygamy, adultery, honor and support for potentially child-bearing couples and the like, the common law was, for a long time, deeply shaped by, and is still remarkably shaped by, Jewish and Christian experience, imagination and understanding.

I am going to have to obviously abbreviate and speak rapidly, but I'll do my best and then quit as close to 10 minutes as I can.

Let me speak as a Catholic, that is, as one of a community representing 1 in 4 of all Americans.  Even most Catholics who are not practicing Catholics at least get married in the Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church in America witnesses to some 250,000 marriages each year.  Catholics take much of their conception of the nature, restrictions, privileges and obligations of marriage from the Jewish tradition.

On the other hand, Christ added some new understandings.  He made marriage one of the seven sacraments, that is, one of those physical signs of God's abiding presence that Christ singled out as central to the daily life of his people.  In view of this binding presence of God in marriage--what God has joined together, let no man put asunder--Christ forbade divorce even more stringently than Moses had.

It is as if Heaven itself is implicated in this union.  Indeed, the covenant between man and woman in marriage is, by tradition and scripture, a reenactment of the covenant between the Creator and his people Israel, made with Moses and symbolically protected in the holy of holies.  It is similarly a reenactment of the covenant between God and his new people, the second Israel.

Abraham Lincoln was so moved by this abiding image of a permanent covenant that he described the union between the states as a sacred covenant, for whose maintenance he felt obliged to support, even the massive dislocation and blood-letting of the Civil War.

There is another unity which marriage shares.  Right at the top of the Book of Genesis we are told that when God created humans, man and woman he created them, and also in his image he created them.

Catholic thinkers, and I believe Jewish thinkers, also, have long seen in this text a revelation of something about the nature of God that we would never have known apart from God's revelation of it.  There is something about the union of man and woman that mirrors, in some way, the nature of God himself.  Male and female together image God, not woman alone, not man alone, but both together.

In this privileged union, in Catholic thought, lies the special grace of matrimony, the special sharing in God's own inner life.  And, in fact, if I may put the point less mystically, more biologically, when man and woman, male and female, mate, they form a single biological reproductive unit; that is, one alone cannot reproduce, and the other cannot reproduce.  Only the two together, in mating, can reproduce.  And it's in this unity which is capable of fruitfulness that there is an image of this creation born.  That's been the traditional way of regarding it.

Indeed, the enactment of the sacrament is not fulfilled except in the marital act of two becoming one flesh in the mating.  That's when marriage is consummated.  That's what makes a marriage legal.  That consummation is required for the sacrament's validity.

It is not only understood, but publicly taught, that the act should be open to the bearing of children, but obviously there are many more acts of marital union than there are acts of the bearing of children.  All of this may be a little too mystical for a secular age, but a secular age ought not to tamper with mysteries it does not fully understand.

In the Jewish testament, too, in the Song of Psalms, at least as Catholics read it, there is an unbelievably haunting and romantic mystical meditation on the union of the soul with God as the lover is united with his lady.  I bear some words of that in Hebrew on the wedding ring presented me by my wife on our wedding day. "I for my beloved, my beloved for me."

Well, I'm going to have to skip a bit, but more than Jonathan has contemplated, I believe, American law, concerning the marriage of man and woman, is still nourished, out of sight, in the background by Jewish and Christian understandings of the covenant of God with his two people, which are both, both covenants, in the Catholic view, eternal.  Moreover, the marriage of a man and a woman, understandably an image of the inner nature of God, has for some 5,000 years been honored as no other friendship.

I believe this statement of the situation describes telegraphically the actual living, historical and psychological background of the common law.  Of course, the common law is not obliged to give all of the reasons and justifications for this, merely the practical institutions which, so to speak, in flesh, a Jewish and Christian way of living in daily law.

It is the contemporary project, of course, to tear off the flesh of Judaism and Christianity from the bones of the common law.  The battle pennant under which this cause is being fought is the separation of church and state, but that ensign is maldesigned.  That battle was won long ago when the Church of England and any other church was prevented from being the establish church of the United States.

What is really being asked now is something else--the separation of faith from practice, and that really cannot be done without killing the living, breathing being.  In the real world, as distinct from the current world of the law schools and the law courts, most of us are not merely secular agents.  Marriage is one of those places in which religious faith is embodied in real lives.  You may try to pull faith and real lives asunder, but men and women of honor cannot allow that to be done to them.

I have some more, which maybe will come out in the discussions, on public policy implications, but let me leave it at that to respect the time.

[Applause.]

MR. DeMUTH:  Michael, thank you very much.

Now, Charles Murray.

MR. MURRAY:  Thank you, Chris.

Your introduction of the book stole a lot of the things I was going to say.  Every good thing you said about the book I was going to say.  I will add a few others.

One is that, when you actually heard Jonathan today, he was engaged, primarily, as is natural given his limited time, at making his case. His presentation did not convey the degree to which he makes the other side's case utterly fairly, in a nuanced way, sometimes much more eloquently than the opposition actually makes it, and he deals with the opposite point of view without taking any cheap shots, and he does it very thoroughly.
  So whether he has persuaded you or not at  the end of it all, you do not have the sense that you have been short-changed, nor do you have the comfort of saying to yourself, well, he doesn't really understand.

Also, and I think this is very important for people who are listening who are opponents of gay marriage or who are heterosexual or both, you have to understand something about this book.  Jonathan takes marriage extremely seriously.  No one in this room, and there are some people in this room who take marriage very seriously, indeed, takes it more seriously than Jonathan does or understands its dimensions better than Jonathan does, and I will make that as a flat statement.

So it needs to be read by heterosexuals.  It needs to be read by people who are opposed to gay marriage.  I would also add it needs to be read by homosexuals because I think a lot of times when they say they want gay marriage, they don't have any idea what they're getting into, and Jonathan tells them.

[Laughter.]

MR. MURRAY:  And even though I think, in the interest of full disclosure, it should be said that I have been a friend of Jonathan's for some years, as indeed, all of us have been, I have been on many book panels before, and I haven't said this kind of thing about very many books.  It is a brilliant, brilliant book.

Let me begin, because my presentation is going to, in a sense, take one of the cheap shots that Jonathan eschews, let me begin by saying that if Jonathan's agenda could be enacted exactly as he wants it, I would support it, and that has two elements:

One is that this be fought out state-by-state, that we have "canaries in the coal mine," as I like to think of it.  Whereby, if things go wrong, we will have a chance to see some of those outcomes, and we'll also have a chance to craft better law as time goes on.  That's one crucial element of Jonathan's argument.

And another crucial element of Jonathan's argument, which he actually didn't make a big point of today, is that his Rule No. 1 is that, to get the benefits of marriage, you have to marry.

Is that close enough to your wording?

None of this "marriage lite," as Jonathan calls it.  You take on marriage, in its full obligations, and you don't have civil unions of the kind he's talking about.  And if you could have that as well, I would swallow hard and say legalize gay marriage in the sense that Jonathan talks about it.

Now, I say that because I'm going to say a lot of things subsequently in which I am disagreeing with the outcomes, as Jonathan sees them, but what I'm really doing is saying, "Jonathan, the way things are really going to play out are going to be bad in ways that you don't think they would be bad if your agenda were played out."

And it may be true that they wouldn't be bad if his agenda were played out, but that's not what we're going to get.  Because that gets to the first issue on which Jonathan thoroughly convinced me that those of us who are not proponents of gay marriage do not have the option of hoping the issue will go away.  We have reached a bend in the river, as Jonathan says many times, and major changes will happen, and we do not have the option of saying let's just hope it goes away.  The only question is how do we tweak the policy options that remain open to us?

I'm even more of an "inevitablist," if that's a word, than Jonathan is.  I don't think he's going to get his state-by-state consideration.  The constitutional scholars with whom I have discussed this issue--and AEI has access to some very good ones--say this is a done deal, given today's constitutional jurisprudence, that over the next few years we will see some carefully crafted court cases put before carefully selected judges, and we know, from the way these things work--I'm not saying this is the way it should work, given the way the Constitution is written, but the way it will work, given constitutional jurisprudence as it currently stands, we will have legal gay unions of some form throughout the country within a relatively few years.

Now, I'm not going to defend that argument, Jonathan, in the course of the discussion because I'm not a constitutional scholar.  I will say that that's the premise from which I'm working in my discussion.

I also assume that a constitutional amendment the ban gay marriage will fail.  I'm not in favor of such an amendment, but that's not the point.  My point is it's not going to happen, and that has to be part of our thinking about the reality.  So, from my point of view, there are really only two pressure points for tweaking the course that this revolution takes:

One is a constitutional amendment that does not ban gay marriages, but expressly permits states not to recognize marriages in other states.   In other words, it would constitutionally enforce one aspect of Jonathan's regime here.

It's conceivable that might get some traction if it started to be proposed and pushed in a serious kind of a way.  I don't know what the odds are.  That is a constitutional amendment which I think, at this point, I would be willing to support.

The other pressure point goes to the question of marriage versus civil unions or "marriage lite," as Jonathan calls them in a wonderful phrase.  Here's another point at which Jonathan absolutely persuaded me.  Jonathan says that "marriage lite" is going to be seriously damaging to heterosexual marriage because, if civil unions are even easier to get out of than marriage is now, that enable to get the economic and statutory goodies of marriage without taking on the full symbolic and legal obligations of marriage, they will remove the last vestige of stigma about cohabitation as a framework for having children.

So, if you have civil unions become the way that gays deal with the problem, believe me, there will be a whole lot of heterosexuals which will be very happy to join in with that movement, and you will have, I think, a major increase in alternatives to marriage and the results will be just as bad as Jonathan says they are.

Jonathan's Rule No. 1, that to get the benefits of marriage you have to get married is powerfully argued from a variety of directions that are wholly convincing.  I just went from being mildly positive about civil union as a solution to the gay marriage issue to being adamantly opposed.

Now, the problem is, then what?  Now,  how is it we are going to get states to repeal all of the many forms of civil unions that are already in force?  How is it that we are going to get corporations which have de facto recognition of civil unions by granting  a variety of benefits to nonmarried employees who can show a certain kind of partnership, what's the kind of moral suasion we are going to use to get corporations to repeal those policies because repealing those policies would be a PR disaster for any large corporation.

In other words, what I've just said is that I've offered two policy recommendations, a constitutional amendment and a far-flung rollback in state laws, plus a campaign of moral suasion for corporations, and I don't think any of them is going to work, which leaves me with having the satisfaction of a solution, theoretically, but nothing resembling a real solution to the problem.

Well, today, we're not engaged primarily in a discussion of the nuts and bolts of what should be, but we are talking about what is likely to be, and that has to color--and has colored--my views of Jonathan's arguments about will this be good for gays and good for straights.

Good for gays.  Will gay marriage be good for gays?  Irvine Kristol said once at a dinner party I attended--I do not know whether this one of Irving's carefully thought-out policy positions or not--but he said something which has been kind of a touchstone for me in thinking about this issue.  He said, when talking about gay marriage, "Let them have it.  They won't like it."

Like a Japanese Coan, this is a statement to meditate upon because there is a great deal buried within that statement that I think has a lot of merit.  I will say, however, that Jonathan went a fair way toward making me think that I have to rethink some of my previous assumptions.  He has certainly convinced me that he, Jonathan Rauch, will like gay marriage and that some other unknown proportion of gays will like it, but I have no idea how large that proportion is.  I don't think Jonathan has any way of knowing what it is either.   As he talks about in the book, the data on these issues are really hard to come by.

Jonathan has persuaded me that the prevalent view of gays as hopelessly promiscuous is based on some very shaky evidence, and that whereas there may be differences in means and distributions between gays and heterosexuals on promiscuity, our common understanding of it is probably quite exaggerated.

In any case, I think Jonathan makes the case that marriage will be good for gays.  Maybe even civil unions will be good for gays.  That's another issue, but I think marriage, as he talks about it, would definitely be good for gays, and I also want to underline I think the validity of Jonathan's point that he made in his presentation today that increasing the ability of any significant group of people to pursue happiness is an important outcome, and it's not good enough to say, well, it's a very small proportion of the population.

Jonathan's statement that the ability to enter into a good marriage is one of the central ways in which human beings pursue happiness is true and that this is denied arbitrarily--note the key word "arbitrarily"--to who is anyone who is bad.  You have to have that at the center of your calculations on this.

Gay marriage will be good for gays.  That much I go with.  Will it be good for straights?  Here we get to the distinction between what Jonathan wants as a solution and the way I think this will actually play out.

The reality that faces us, increased use of civil unions for straights as well as gays, will not be good for straights.  It is a looming disaster, and it's especially a looming disaster in the socialization of the next generation which, as far I am concerned, is the compelling--

[Tape change.  T1 Side B is muffled and difficult to hear.]

MR. MURRAY:  [In progress.]  It will be a looming disaster if we have increased use of civil unions, but I don't really think the gay marriage movement has anything to do with that.  It is heterosexuals who have trashed marriage, not gays.  If marriage still had the same weight and consensual allegiance it had 50 years ago, if the percentage of children born out of wedlock was still 4 or 5 percent, if divorce were still considered the last resort, if becoming a husband and father was the indispensable way in which a male became a fully grown adult, if becoming a wife and mother was the indispensable way in which a female became a fully adult woman, if that were true, and I apologize for putting it this way, Jonathan, but I think it's true, if that were true, the idea of gay marriage would be dismissed out of hand because, in that context, the words "gay" and "marriage" would be so obviously an oxymoron.  Now, it isn't so obvious that they are an oxymoron and Jonathan's arguments therefore have weight.

In any case, I don't think the real way that this is going to play out in the real world is going to be good for straight marriage, even though it might be good in the way that Jonathan would like it to play out, but it's not [inaudible] nor is the state of the institution of marriage [inaudible] gays.  Heterosexuals have met the enemy, and they are us.

Is it good for the country?  Well, no.  Let me not [inaudible] here.  We are talking about the central, social institution of our civilization and its decay over the last several decades.  Gay unions, while not a cause of that decay, are likely to be a minor contributor to its continuing decay, and there is no way that can be considered good the way it will actually play out, and that's of course the reality we have to deal with.

Here, I will be especially blunt.  The gays constitute [inaudible] 3 to 5 percent of the population [inaudible].  That's the range of the usual estimates.  Only some portion of that 3 to 5 percent will want to engage in marriage, so we're talking about an even smaller percentage of total population.  A great good can be done for that tiny a percent of the population and still not be a net good for the culture as a whole, and I think that's what we're [inaudible] with the situations that Jonathan analyzes.  That does not put aside Jonathan's point that you can't treat people as means, rather than ends, in order to [inaudible] of his point about having to take into account the good done for that small percentage.

Well, let me conclude on a note that may be such a determined effort to be optimistic that you may want to dismiss it out of hand.  I actually think that the unintended consequences here could be good rather than bad as well.

We're going to have gay unions of some sort legal throughout the country in a few years.  That's my premise.  But I keep thinking about the way in which central important institutions, institutions that have a real underlying vitality and validity thrive under pressure.

I also keep thinking about the way that civil institutions invariably weaken, and I don't think "invariably" is too strong a term when the [inaudible] hand of government is laid upon them.  Compare religiosity in Europe, where helpful governments provide plenty of money to support religion with America, where thankfully the government still provides none.

Compare fertility rates in government, where governments provide all manner of child allowances, day care centers, maternal and paternal leave, and fertility rates in the United States, where all of these helpful interventions are still comparatively minor.

Now, consider marriage.  In recent decades, our government first linked a variety of benefits with being married and is now in the process of extending those benefits to those who make minor commitments of partnering, as long as both find it [inaudible].

What will happen to heterosexual marriage when gay marriage is a nationwide fact of life?  In terms of its substantive causal effects, Jonathan is right.  It's not going to make much difference.  Symbolically, it might make a difference, and a good difference.  And here is, finally, Jonathan, where I do have to part company with you, like Michael.  But this, again, as Michael said, one of the lovely things about Jonathan, Jonathan put my position on Pages 159 and 160 better than I can.  And it's tempting to close my speech by just quoting that verbatim and saying it's mine, but I will say it in other ways.

It was clarified for me Monday morning in a hotel room in St. Petersburg, after I'd spent the weekend wrestling with Jonathan's book, and it came to me quite [inaudible] because I found Jonathan's book so powerfully persuasive.  It did come [inaudible], and it was a memory of my eldest daughter's marriage about four or five years ago.

During the course of the evening, as the party celebrating the marriage went on, I had one of the transforming experiences of my life, maybe not [inaudible] transforming, but it was as close to a mystical experience as I've had.  I had this sudden sense of being part of a long line of fathers that went back to the dawn of time  celebrating the marriage of their daughters.  And the reason for that wasn't because they had [inaudible] their love, it wasn't because they were committing themselves to a lifetime together.  It was rather that I had this enormous sense of satisfaction that they were engaged in an enterprise that had been central to all of our pasts.

And then again unbidden[?], I imagined what if it turns out that one of my other children were gay and wanted to marry their lover.  I would certainly throw just as big a party.  I would be just as happy for the happiness of that child as I was for the daughter I married.  I would not have had that same sense of being part of that long line.  And in that difference I think finally lies the reasons why--and I know this drives Jonathan crazy--I will give a whole lot, and I won't give you the words.

But, you know, that isn't necessarily bad either for Jonathan or for marriage.  If there is widespread civil unions among heterosexuals and gays, and if marriage really is as central and as important as I think it is, it is quite possible that it is this that will inspire some elements of people who do value marriage, for the reasons I have just described, to think about the legacy that is their obligation to defend and think of ways not through the use of government, but through the other ways that human institutions strive to nourish and [inaudible].

Thank you.

[Applause.]

MR. DeMUTH:  We've had three excellent presentations, and I want to begin by giving Jonathan the opportunity to respond to what Michael Charles have said, and I don't want to add to his notes of things to respond to and say, but I want to give a very brief summary of how I see the state of play, having listened to the three of you speak and having read Jonathan's book.

First of all, I think the easiest part of Jonathan's argument, with which he has succeeded up at this table pretty clearly, is that the idea of a national constitutional ban of gay marriage anywhere forevermore is a profoundly bad idea and that, secondly, debate on this subject, to the extent possible, should be democratic, slow, incremental, open-minded and with serious attention to its effects.

I think that his affirmative argument for gay marriage going beyond these two points, are more difficult and want to point that the arguments are essentially prudential arguments.  He has a very strong belief--understanding--of what the benefits would be, but at the end of the day, he recognizes important uncertainties.  And in his arguments, especially on managing risk rationally, their market forces, these things are going to happen, the question is how governments can do the best or at least do the least harm given those circumstances are I think very strong arguments.  They're prudential arguments.

The strongest arguments that have been made against his affirmative proposal that I have heard here, and here I will just elaborate maybe  slightly on what my friend Jonathan had said, is that the legalization of gay marriage would continue inevitably, however it was done, whatever the findings of facts and so forth in the preamble to the state legislation that Jonathan would favor, would inevitably be part of the continuing isolation of religious tradition, and the influence of religious thought and religious practice in American life.

Secondly, we cannot discount the possibilities that, as gay couples come into the institution of marriage, the institution would change itself.  I thought the most powerful part of his presentation here this afternoon was on the importance of the welfare and happiness of homosexual couples themselves and his firm rejection of a utilitarian calculus.

Certainly, as he describes Maggie Gallagher's counterargument, that's a very powerful statement.  On the one hand, one thing no society can possibly do is to ignore the importance of the rearing of children and the raising of successive populations, generations.  For a society to be a continuing enterprise of any kind, requires, even to the point of doing some harm, that it not ignore threats to the continuation of its population.  America is the most religious nation on earth, and it's also the nation where child-rearing and procreation, for all of the problems we have, are radically different from what we're observing in less-religious nations, such a Asia and Europe.  So that's a very large question for a society as a whole, and it certainly has to be taken with the utmost of seriousness.

Finally, I would say that I agree with Charles that it is going to happen.  It's going to happen in a way that Jonathan doesn't like any more than anybody else up here.  It's going to happen by court imposition, it's going to be rights-based rather than prudential, and it will be part of the larger political agenda that is now part of the case for gay marriage that Jonathan makes.  Essentially, marriage is going to be privatized.  And it has not been a private institution for the past thousand years.  And so all of us, regardless of our position on the merits of this particular case, had better start thinking seriously, as Charles proposed at the conclusion of his remarks, to strengthening the institution of this newly privatized institution and coming up with new political, religious, social techniques, methods for making this the kind of institution that Jonathan wants it to be for everyone.

Jonathan?

MR. RAUCH:  Wow.  Thank you.  What an amazingly thoughtful group of commentators.  It's a privilege to sit up here with you folks.  Thank you all so much.

I'm only too well aware that anything I say now will cut into discussion time, and the folks in the audience are, many of them, no less distinguished.  So I'm just going to put out a few bullet points.  I'm not going to try anything like a comprehensive response or rebuttal, but I'll try to group together some of the things that we've heard and just tossing things out at you.

Michael Novak's point is a very deep point and one that I take very seriously in the book and devote a whole chapter to.  The statement he made that I take issue with is that, having conceded that it's actually my friend's whose argument I hadn't answered--this was the friend who said marriage is bigger than we are.  It comes from someplace higher--that it was I who hadn't answered that question with a glib response about separation of church and state, I don't take that back in the next sentence.  I go on to discuss it at some great length.  And this is the problem of unintended consequences, which I take to be the biggest and most curious genuine objection to same-sex marriage, and that's it.

Whether you call it an institution from God, as a Catholic would, as I think Michael Novak would, or if you call it a tradition that's inscribed in society's DNA, for 3,000 continuous years of history, without exception, in Western culture, we're tinkering with something very, very big and very deep, and we may not be smarter than our customs.  Should we do that?  Is that a prudential thing to do?

Now, that's something--here's my chance to advertise the book--there's a lot of thinking about how to cope with that problem, but what it boils down to is this: this institution is not going to stay the same.  We don't have the choice of leaving it alone.  The prudential thing to do in this situation is to gather some data, to try it and to find out, because the alternatives, which is something Charles increasingly I think understands, are not going to be great, a point I'll come back to.

I'd also ask Michael to remember that there's going to be increasingly religion on both sides of this issue.  We're having a couple unitarian ministers who are being threatened with jail, having criminal charges brought against them in New York for marrying couples, and that's just the beginning.  So this will, in time, be church against church.

Religion is important, civil rights are important in this argument, but like civil rights, talk about the religious basis of marriage only begins the argument.  It doesn't end it.  We've still got to decide what the best policy is, and some people's religion is going to wind up on the losing side, however we come out.  That's another argument, in my view, for a federalist solution, where you don't have to have a single national outcome.  Texas and Massachusetts can decide this issue differently [inaudible].

Charles is fatalistic about that, and so is Chris.  I simply have to demur.  I realize that there are legal scholars saying it's inevitable that the courts will order same-sex marriage nationally.  I simply believe that that's wrong.  I don't think constitutional law is anywhere near that, and I certainly don't think the full faith and credit clause requires it.   And moreover, a scholar here at AEI, among others, have proposed an amendment saying that states don't have to recognize each other's gay marriages, and that would forestall any such problems for years at a stretch.  So I simply don't think national court imposition is all that likely.

Moreover, I think we have to talk about the direction we want to go in.  We simply can't take for granted that the wrong thing will happen.  I think it would be helpful if conservatives decided, as a matter of policy, the policy ought to be state-by-state, and gay marriage, and get rid of "marriage lite."  And I think if conservatives said that, people would listen.  And I think that would help push policy in the direction of understanding that marriage is a good thing, and it's a special thing and that we shouldn't have a single national solution.

So I would urge Charles, at least, to embrace that notion as a policy goal rather than begrudgingly say it might make sense, but it'll never happen.

A chink in the armor of all of the commentators is cohabitation.  Charles, it seems, has agreed with most of the arguments in the book, while disagreeing with the conclusion that gay marriage is good.  I'm not sure I like that.  I think I'd rather it were the other way around.

[Laughter.]

MR. RAUCH:  I think I'd rather he thought all of the arguments were wrong, but came out for gay marriage anyway.

He thinks civil unions are a terrible idea.  I don't put it that way.  Here's my hierarchy of choices:

First, and by far the best, marriage for everybody, no "marriage lite."

Second, marriage plus "marriage lite."  I think "marriage lite" is going to be a lot less attractive when you still have the universal model of marriage out there for people to follow.

Third, grudgingly, because I think it's bad for marriage, marriage for straights, civil unions for gays.  That's the way the country seems to be going.  However, worst of all, marriage for straights, nothing for gays.  That ensures, it positively ensures, in my opinion, that we will spend the next 50 years finding ways to bestow the privileges of marriage on cohabitation.  Cohabitation is up 72 percent just in the decade of the '90s.  That's people deciding not to get married.  Some of that's just delaying marriage, but a lot of it is people deciding, hey, who needs marriage?  Folks, that's the worst outcome of all.

Charles talked about the unforeseen consequences of admitting gays to this institution.  I'd only add, as I said earlier, think harder about the consequences of not admitting gays, where they're going to go and what will follow from that.  I suppose that's as good a point as any on which to end, except to thank you again for some remarkably thoughtful comments.

MR. DeMUTH:  Jonathan, thank you very much.

I'm going to open this up to a general discussion, and we have a roving microphone.  And I would like to ask people to raise their hands, and we'll move it around.  We'll start over here, and please introduce yourself, ask your questions, make your comments.

Yes, sir?

MR. LOPEZ:  Hello.  I'm Manuel Lopez, a student at the University of Chicago, but visiting here.

I think how radical a change gay marriage would be hasn't been taken into account, I think, in what I've heard today.  I would agree with Mr. Novak.  The crucial thing is procreation, regardless of whether a couple has children or not, of course, most do, even a sexual differentiation between men and women is a sexual difference around their reproductive capacity.  That's the male/female difference.

Now, gay marriage would be definitely disconnecting marriage from procreation in the most extreme, complete way imaginable, and I think that would make marriage itself a different thing, particularly to children growing up.  I mean, of course, people who are adults, their view of marriage is already settled, but the question is what happens to future generations?  How do they grow up thinking about marriage?

And it seems to me that if you disconnect it from procreation, that means that marriage would seem to them less bound up with a world larger than we are.  Marriage would start to seem simply, to be simply a commitment that people make, an act of the will, and less like a conformity to a larger order of things, a natural order or a religious order, but something above mere human will.

And I think such a change would not be good, would not lead to greater happiness.  People would start taking their marriages less seriously than they already do.  They would consider alternatives more readily when the going gets tough, and I think they would seek guidance more often in desire, whim or fashion, among other consequences.  And I wonder whether--I think there's a fairly [inaudible] is what I'd say about what the effect of such a radical change would be.

MR. RAUCH:  Thank you very much for that.  It's a deep subject, and forgive me if I make a few very [inaudible] remarks.

The first point about that is the minute this country is willing to deny any heterosexual couple a marriage on the grounds that they are infertile or can't procreate, I'll accept that for myself, but there is an equality issue here, and it is important.  Fifty-six percent of married couples in this country don't have children.  Many of them can't have children.

The second deeper point on the equality point is I think we all understand instinctively than even when an elderly, nonprocreative couple gets married, that those are two fewer people on the frontier of vulnerability in society, and that's a very good thing, and we celebrate those marriages.  Gay people only extend that acceptance to an additional 3 percent of the population.  Now, admittedly, one group is infertile business of gender, the other group is infertile for other reasons, but it seems to me that that cannot be the core issue here.

Maggie Gallagher is fond of saying we shouldn't have gay marriage because children need a mommy and daddy.  My response to that is, no, children don't need a mommy and daddy.  Children have a mommy and daddy because that's how we get children.  What children need is a married mommy and daddy.  That's the problem today.  Marriage is not for procreation.  Sex is for procreation.  Marriage is for forming families, it seems to me.  Adults without children should marry and form families.  Adults with children should marry and form families.  And it's for precisely the reasons that you're against gay marriage that I think I'm for it.

If I want a society in which marriage is the preferred behavior modeled by all, it clearly won't work to say marriage is a behavior only for people who can have kids because we're well beyond that.  We're not going to say that.  Now, what we ought to say is marriage is for everybody.  It's a universal norm, and it's good for everybody whether you have kids or not.  So I feel I'm helping to establish that norm and not breaking it down.

MR. DeMUTH:  Irving?

MR. KRISTOL:  Two points.  One is minor.  Sigmund Freud was once asked what he thought one of the deficiencies in psychoanalysis was, and he said, "The problem is with the patients.  Those vulgarians all want to be happy."

I think the word "happiness" probably should be excluded from serious discussions of social and political philosophy.  Usually happiness is what happens to you as a result of not pursuing it, but pursuing other things, and to pursue happiness is absurd.  [Inaudible] you never find it.  [Inaudible], by the way.

I am struck by another aspect of this discussion as a discussion is the Supreme Court seems to have caught the spirit [inaudible] very well when it said, "Central[?] relations, including marriage, or relations between two individuals who are capable of making the basic decisions on their own."

Marriage is not between individuals.  Marriage is between families, and one of the things you discover, if and when you get married, you come back from a honeymoon, and you discover you have acquired a father-in-law and a mother-in-law, who are there for your lifetime and who will be heard, and not only that you have acquired [inaudible], an aunt and an uncle, and you have children, and they have cousins.  This is what families do.  Families generate relationships, and some [inaudible] of those relationships are [inaudible].

Now, there are [inaudible] at the moment to what we call society, and the major one has been pointed out very well by Jonathan Rauch, which is nonmarriage of heterosexuals.  I, personally, [inaudible] why young people who don't want to have children bother getting married.  It's utterly pointless and just a problem for them in the future.

There is a question as to whether our society today can cope with the large numbers of young people who want to live together, pursue happiness, and not get married.  It's not at all clear. [Inaudible] of a generation at least before the evidence is in as to what happens to the social, political and human order.  [Inaudible] to be skeptical about heterosexual marriages without children [inaudible].  [Inaudible] a bit skeptical about homosexual marriages, how they will fit into society.  If they do [inaudible] homosexual marriages will not, despite Jonathan's best picture, generate the kind of relations that result in [inaudible].

One has the right to say the evidence of that is still out.  [Inaudible] heterosexual childless marriages [inaudible].

[Audio is cutting in and out.]

MR. RAUCH:  I'd actually like to hear what Charles has to say about the pursuit of happiness should be abolished from our conversations.

[Laughter.]

MR. RAUCH:  I'd only say that, Irving, I agree with so much of what you said that it's perhaps not a coincidence, when I was at AEI, my office was next door to yours.  I must have absorbed something.  A lot of what marriage is that makes it so essential and unique is marriage is not a commitment, a contract between two people, it's a commitment and a contract between the couple and their community.

And what makes it uniquely powerful, what gives it it's special binding force, it fortifies rather than just ratifying the relationships, are the ceremonies, and the vows, and the rings, and the in-laws, and the families, and the presence of the friends at the wedding, and the anniversaries, and the colleagues that said, "How's your wife?  How's your husband?" every day, meaning they expect you to know the answer to that question.

And, yes, I believe that we will see a lot of family and community acceptance of gay couples.  Indeed, I think not only will we see that with gay marriage, which will be good for gays, but we'll also see it without gay marriage, except it'll be bestowed on co-habitation.  I keep coming back to that.  We don't live in a first-choice world.  Real conservatives I think need to take the best choice available.

MR. MURRAY:  I'd like to just augment by pointing out that, within heterosexual marriage, the network formation you've just described is becoming increasingly obsolete, that we were having more and more--this is true in Europe, of course, far more than the United States--but you are having a linear relationship where you have mother-child, child-child.  There are no aunts.  There are no uncles.  There are no cousins, no nephews, no nieces.  We are seeing something genuinely new under the sun in terms of a structure which does not have these interlocking networks, and we don't know how that is going to work out either.

None of this goes against what you said, Irving.  It just is that we have a brave new world out there in which gays don't even enter into it, in terms of the function of marriage as a network formation.

MR. DeMUTH:  Yes, John Lott?

MR. LOTT:  John Lott, AEI.

I also count Jon as a friend of mine, and I look forward to reading this book.  I haven't read it yet, but I guess I have a couple of questions.  One is the political forces are going to be unleased, I think, that will work to weaken marriage, and I think divorce rates are going to be higher for homosexuals and heterosexuals for a couple simple reasons.

One is that, and that, in turn, will keep the political pressures, once people are in marriage and want to get out, to create political forces to weaken marriage.  And I think for a couple simple reasons:

One is homosexual relationships are less likely going to have children.  They're also less likely going to have children where the genes of the children where the genes of the children are shared by both the people in the relationship.  I think both of those factors are going to make it so that people have less invested in the relationship, and any normal shock that you have that occurs for relationships, in general, is going to make it relatively less costly for them to leave the relationship and go on to some other relationships.

The promiscuity-type things I think enter in, to some extent, there, also, in the sense that if a homosexual is promiscuous, the cost, in terms of maybe getting the other party pregnant or something like that, and the costs that that may create for forcing marriages is going to be different there, too.

I think, if anything, the issue of children make a much stronger argument for allowing polygamy than it does for, you know, if you're going to have alternative types of relationships, then it's going to have homosexual relationships.

There's also another thing, too, and that is I think the institution of marriage, and it's weakened over time, but it was set up to protect asymmetric investment in relationships, that because of the probabilities that a woman, because she gets pregnant, does the nursing, will make more investments in the kids, that causes both the two parents to kind of make, one, the woman to make more investment in the household relative to the man.  In order to protect her, I would imagine part of the rules for marriage have been to protect those types of investments.  Now, that's been weakened over time because you have no-fault divorce, but I think this is going to move that even further in that direction.

I could go on, but those are a few things.

Thank you.

MR. DeMUTH:  John, you're a wonderful [audio break] scholar.  Do you think--this is John Lott, at AEI, who just spoke--would you guess that the harm he mentioned if same-sex marriage which affects a fairly small proportion of the population, 3 percent, perhaps, 4 percent, do you think those harms would be sufficient in magnitude, enough to outweigh the benefits of the gay couples involved who are not excluded all together from the culture of marriage and the opportunity to marry?

MR. LOTT:  I'm happy to give weight to all of the benefits that you have there.  I'm not trying to make a type of argument where it's either/or.  I think both costs and benefits need to be included.  But I will say is you have, one thing to take into account, I think the influence of homosexuals will be greater than their share of the population, in part, because they're less likely to have kids.

I mean, I think one of the reasons why maybe homosexuals are weighted more heavily in terms of general political discussion is that, if you have kids that's a big thing, in terms of you're not going to get involved in political activity and other types of things to the extent that you would if you don't have kids.  And so their political influence I think is weighted more greatly than their share of the population.  And I think at the margin, I mean, I guess the question I would ask is if you would disagree at the margin the type of forces that I'm talking about would weaken the institution of marriage.  I don't see how they could do anything other.

I mean, we still may say we'll have this because of these other costs and benefits that you want to bring up, but I'm saying, at the margin, it seems hard to argue that this wouldn't create political pressures to further weaken the institution of marriage and make it easier over time for people to get out of it than it is already.

MR. RAUCH:  Granting that we're both engaged in pure conjecture here, that we have absolutely no data that bears on the point, if my argument is correct, even if you're right, there will be powerful countervailing tendencies in the fact that the advertisement for marriage that you get, for example, when 15 years from now the best director stands up at the Academy Awards holding that statuette and says, "And I would like to thank my husband--" this is a male director I'm envisioning "--I'd like to thank my husband of 15 years, without whom I could have done none of this," while the camera pans to the front row and shows a beaming, tearful husband.  That's a heck of an advertisement for marriage.

So, if I'm correct, and even if you're right, there are important countervailing forces, I'd also point out it's entirely possible gay divorce rates will be lower and gay people may be more likely to take marriage seriously than, say, Britney Spears only because they've been excluded for so long, and they know what it means.  We also have lesbians to think about.  They, if anything, seem to be more nesting than heterosexual couples.

I'd also remind you that, according to the census, 28 percent of gay couples have kids.  So that's a lot of people who have the power of kids to keep them together.

And, finally, here I think I do have to fall back, to some extent, on a reminder that there is a civil rights element to all of this.  The first day someone comes along and says we're going to prohibit heterosexual couples from marrying on the grounds that their marrying may marginally affect someone else's marriage for the worse, I'll accept that.  But it seems to me that if that's all we're going on, that's not enough.

I think a reasonable solution to that problem is to get the data.  Let's try it.  I think we'll see that the kinds of factors you're talking about are likely to be very small and at least outweighed by the benefits to gay couples, but let's try.  Let's find out.

MR. DeMUTH:  Great.  We have two people in the back, and then we're going to come up front here.  This woman has been very patient.

MS. MALONE:  Hi, I'm Bernadette Malone.  I'm an editor at Penguin.

The civil rights question is interesting.  If we are no longer talking about traditional marriage--one man, one woman--on what grounds does the government prevent polygamist unions or interfamily marriage?  I hate to call it incest because I'm thinking of between two consenting adults, first cousins, sisters and brothers, et cetera.  Are there grounds for the state to deny those people their own civil rights?  And, if not, should maybe marriage, should the state get out of the marriage business altogether?  Would that be preferable?

MR. RAUCH:  Should I be continuing to answer all of the questions or should I give some of my panelists some time?

MR.          :  [Inaudible.]

MR. RAUCH:  Polygamy and incestuous marriage.  What you just heard John Lott say was very interesting and important and typically acute from one of I think the most acute scholars I know.  It is not my side of the argument that has a polygamy problem.  That problem belongs to those people who say marriage is for procreation, or marriage is for mommies and daddies or marriage is for opposite sex.  Because, if you're in favor of procreation, polygamy is great.  Ask the Saudi royal family, who favors, if you favor mommies and daddies, polygamy is great.

The core element of our case, the case for same-sex marriage, is that this is an extension of the principle of equal opportunity marriage.  That is to say everyone should have the opportunity to marry in an egalitarian society.  That's what we're maximizing by going towards gay marriage.  We're saying that the right number of people you can marry isn't two, three, four or zero--zero is the worst number--it's one.

Polygamy invariably means, throughout culture and history, in every society we know, about one man, many wives.  That means somewhere out there, for every polygamist marriage, there is at least one other man who cannot get married.  And with or without gay marriage, my right to marry ends at the moment when it deprives you of your opportunity to marry.

Incestuous marriage I think is a dreadful idea because it introduces the legitimation of sexual predation within families.  Even among adults, you don't want sisters and brothers worried that they're being--what's the word--"groomed" to be spouses or parents and children, and that's also not going to change as a result of gay marriage.

So I argue that there are independent, extremely important reasons why we don't have polygamy, and none of those will change.  In fact, if anything, I think that, as universalizing the franchise by extending it to women saying every human being gets one vote, strengthens, rather than undermines, the one person, one vote principle.  If someone had said to you, if women get one vote, then men will wind up getting two, won't they?  That's not how it worked out.

MR. DeMUTH:  Thank you.

Bonnie?

MS. WACHTEL:  My name is Bonnie Wachtel.

I'm going to address this question to Charles Murray.

Jonathan has said several times, since we have a question about unintended consequences, why don't we conduct an experiment in collection data.  But the major effort of the Weekly Standard on this from a few months ago, which I'd have to say is about the extent of my reading on the subject, was entirely devoted to collecting data.  The data they collected was from Scandinavia.  And essentially the consequences they drew from the experience of Scandinavia with gay marriage, in which it was brought in, I believe, voted in, in Sweden, but imposed judicially in Norway, essentially underscored everything you said.  It illustrated your view of the subject matter along the following lines:

One, very few gays availed themselves of gay marriage after it was put in, leaving the author to assume it was really done as a matter of gaining acceptance for gays rather than as a desire to be in this relationship.  That was point one.

Point two is it was coincident with a sharp decline in heterosexual marriage, which they measured as were people getting married before they had children, after they had one child, after they had two children?

Now, you can criticize the state.  I'm not saying it was lockstep[?], but certainly if you look at the coincidence of those trends, gay marriage was part of the movement of making marriage less important and less observed.  Now, taking that as a predicate, I would ask you the following question:

Jonathan has been asked the question, look, isn't marriage really about raising children?  Isn't it about procreation?  And which he answers the question, but that can't be true because infertile couples can be married.

And your comment, which it seems to me is what every nonreligious person who opposes this, is that it's entirely about raising children.  That is the entire thrust of the argument is you don't want to do damage to heterosexual marriage because heterosexual marriage is the natural means of raising children.

Now, wouldn't that, this isn't minor, this is a deep [inaudible], wouldn't that justify the desire to have a ban on gay marriage?  Simply to remove the issue from people who think of marriage as something just among individuals and not as something that's primarily about raising children and families, it seems to me that is the conclusion that I got.

MR. MURRAY:  Yes, and I will answer in ways which actually are informed by a lot of materia in the book.

In the first place, I spent years being told why welfare really wasn't so bad because look at Scandinavia and its high rates of illegitimacy  and its high rates of welfare, but it still didn't seem have any problems.  So I'll be doggoned if I'm now going to turn around and use Scandinavia as a way of buttressing an argument against gay marriage in this country because I think Scandinavia, in many ways, is sui generis.  Also, I'm not familiar with the specific data that you raised here.

I would be real surprised, however, if gay marriage in Scandinavia bore any resemblance to gay marriage as Jonathan Rauch talks about it.  And if I have a criticism of Jonathan's presentation, it is that he did not spend much time on what I found the most compelling defense of gay marriage.  And he has an extended [inaudible] on the ways in which marriage, apart from the procreative aspects, marriage also means a relationship in which, when something goes wrong with the other person, you drop everything to take care of that person.

And his discussion of this is extremely persuasive, extremely powerful, and in a society where children, as a matter of fact, are less and less, there are fewer and fewer of them, and there are more and more marriages that don't have them, it seems to me that Jonathan's argument about commitment, the commitment of two people and that emotional and psychological dimension of marriage carries a lot of weight.

I think Scandinavia probably had a form of civil unions.  I don't think any form of marriage in Scandinavia is taken very seriously any more in the way that Jonathan takes marriage seriously.  So, no, I don't think the Scandinavian experience applies to what Jonathan would like.  It may very well apply to what we're going to get, and that then brings me back to my problem.

Let me just take this opportunity.  Jonathan said shouldn't I be saying, actually, even though it's going to be tough, that my policy recommendation is that I'm in favor of it, and, Jonathan, I'm willing to do that.  I'm willing to go for the kind of tough gay marriage proposals that Jonathan has in mind, thinking that they will avoid a lot of the problems with heterosexual marriage that, Bonnie, you were describing.

But having said that, I think the way it's actually going to play out is going to be damaging to heterosexual marriage.

MR. RAUCH:  Bonnie, that's such an important question, and the response segues from what Charles said just now.  It is very important to understand something about the article that you cite, which says that gay marriage has not stemmed the decline of marriage in Scandinavia.  The two have been coincident.

Scandinavia does not have same-sex marriage.  I repeat there is no gay marriage in the countries that that author discussed.  The only countries that have it in any form are Belgium, the Netherlands and three provinces of Canada.  What Scandinavia does have is--Charles--civil unions.  The route Europe went is they said--marriage, by the way, was already becoming marginalized in Scandinavia and has been for years--the course here is the general movement away from marriage as a privileged choice in Scandinavia, to a post-marriage society where marriage is an optional piece of paper.

Once they reach that point, it was very natural for them to say, well, let's give civil unions to gay couples.  They did not give them marriage.  In other words, crucial point: Scandinavia is making the mistake that people like me and Andrew Sullivan, and now it seems Charles Murray, would specifically like to keep us away from, and that is creating substitutes for marriage that denigrate the institution and bringing toward a post-marriage society.

It may not be easy to avoid the fate of Scandinavia, though I'm quite optimistic.  But clearly the way to do it is to say "tough marriage."  I love that phrase--"tough marriage."  It's the opposite of what Scandinavia did.  Gay marriage, I believe, is part of the solution here, not part of the problem.

Thank you for letting me elaborate on that point.

MS. MEADE:  I'm Mary Meade, here for the Natural Law Study Center and the Marriage and Family Recovery Programs.

It's not quite clear to me whether you are saying that the sole basis, historically or currently, for marriage is to form a legal relationship and/or to foster commitments.  And it's also not clear if you're only saying that the reason that you [inaudible] is for egalitarian purposes.

So I guess what I'm asking is a brief three-part question, and I would love to hear from the other panelists--

[Tape change.]

MS. MEADE:  Should moral law and natural law play any part in the public policy on marriage?

And, third, how can a purely legal approach to marriage ever be anything but utilitarian, which you say you want to avoid?

MR. RAUCH:  I'll try to hit those quickly, and then I'd like to hear from both Michael and Charles on those points.

Meaning and purpose of marriage, I define it this way.  Having to hold, from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish until death do you part.  That is my definition of the meaning and purpose of marriage, when you boil it right down.

Second, moral and natural law, do they have a role?  Absolutely.  We should all be thinking about moral and natural law, but we should also realize that there are profound disagreements between us on what moral and natural law have to say about this, that there are a lot of people--and I am one of them--who would say that the opportunity to make the noblest commitment that it's possible for human beings to make in this life, the lifelong commitment to the care, and well-being, and love of another is itself a profoundly moral and good thing.

And in disagreement, I believe pluralism is the answer, which is why I favor gay marriage in the format that we discussed.

Is this a purely legal institution?  And, if so, I forget how you put the rest of the question--

MR. DeMUTH:  Why not utilitarian.

MR. RAUCH:  Why not utilitarian.  Oh, well, okay, first of all, the law's first meaning and importance is to be just.  That's not an original point.  If a law is unjust, it is not a good thing.  So we have to consider both the effects of the law and the justice of a law, and I think that both of those absolutely must be considered.  I disagree with those in the gay marriage rights movement who say this is only about civil rights.  Prudential concerns don't come into play, but I equally disagree with those who say this is only prudential, and that issues of legal equality and law treating comparably situated people in comparable ways don't come into play.  Both have to come into play.  Both have to come into play.

MR. NOVAK:  Jonathan, I don't understand what the meaning and purpose of marriage, as you've described it, to love and to cherish, and so forth, the words of the marriage ceremony, why they are of special interest to church or to state, apart from the one human act, which is the reproductive act of man and woman that makes human life possible, that is generative in the way that Irving described.  Leave that out, and it's a beautiful friendship, and it's a remarkable thing that one should lay down his life for his friends, and that's true, but I don't understand why that's a special state interest or a special church interest, on the one hand.

Second, in other words, I don't think that--and you bring this point up in your book, too, what if you develop something and call it marriage, but then a very big part of the population just doesn't regard it as marriage, and you have an empty--

And, second, I'm not clear in my mind--I just ask this for clarification from you--what is the difference between marriage, in your sense, and the civil union in your sense?

And the last point I'd like to make--well, there are two more points I'd like to make.  One is I was very struck, in your book, by the concrete examples you show of people forlorn, unable to get to one another, for one legal reason or another, and so forth, and that's the part of it that moved me to think that, yes, you're right.  These relationships are here.  They're more broadly accepted.  They're going to be here.  Something ought to be done here, and I don't know what nature it ought to take and how much extent you want the state regulating these things.  It's not quite clear to me what the intervention of the state means to the circumstance of the couple you are describing.  I do understand it in a religious setting, I don't in a purely civil setting.

And the last point I want to make is that I deeply wished that all of the principles you enunciate and the prognosis you see for the future would have the rosy side that you expect, but I just don't see it.  I don't see it happening for a whole host of reasons, and I fail to be convinced of it.  It's a little bit too rosy at every step of the way, but leave that aside for the moment, because it would just reopen a discussion of detail.

MR. MURRAY:  I want to hear, Chris, and so just a couple of sentences.  Notice, in this discussion, all of the time, the tension between the kinds of comments you're making about marriage, which I resonate to and agree with, and the other question, the policy question of, given where we are, what do we do next, which is the desirable state of affairs.

And I think it is internally, intellectually consistent, since that is what I have done, to both hear what you said and said, yes, that's right, and also say, given the option available to us, what Jonathan would prefer is probably best.  You won't understand why you might be driven to that position unless you read this book.

MR. DeMUTH:  Did you respond, Jonathan?

MR. RAUCH:  It's up to you of how to divide time between us and the audience.  I could say a few words to Michael or I can just shut up and let others talk.

MR. DeMUTH:  We're coming up to the end and [inaudible].

MR. TUBBS:  David Tubbs, AEI.  So this is sort of a follow-up of what Michael Novak was just saying.

Your definition of marriage, your own understanding of marriage, seems to be radically parasitic on heterosexual marriage or what some would call real marriage.  And I just, I have great difficulty understanding in this debate whether there's a principal basis or an intelligible basis for restricting same-sex marriage to two persons.  I just don't see it.  I just don't see it.

I mean, what you're describing, as Michael Novak suggested, I mean, it could characterize friendship, but it seems to me that if your understanding of marriage is parasitic on traditional marriage or real marriage, then it might have a host of implications for policy and how you expect the future to develop, and I was wondering whether you could comment on that, please.

MR. RAUCH:  I'm sorry.  What do you mean by parasitic?

MR. TUBBS:  Parasitic in the sense that I do not see any intelligible basis, any rational basis for restricting same-sex marriage to two persons.  I don't understand why it couldn't be three or four or five.  Whereas, if we think about real marriage, okay, people are talking about polygamy in this context, if we talk about real marriage, traditional marriage, the intelligible basis of it is one man, one woman, through the procreative act, become parents.

So, if marriage is about promoting or securing--promoting the welfare of children, for example, if marriage is, in large part, about highly vulnerable persons, children, pregnant women, women after they've had a child, then I would say, I would argue that restricting marriage to one man and one woman is intelligible.  There's a rational basis for it, but I don't see it with respect to same-sex couples, by extension, I don't see it with respect to same-sex marriage.

MR. RAUCH:  Marriage is fundamentally different from a friendship, regardless of how many people are involved in a friendship, or any other human relationship because it is the only commitment that we make for life.  It is the only commitment we make which makes caring for a person, requires us to drop absolutely everything, no matter what else you're doing and go to that person's assistance.  It's quite unique in that respect, and that's what same-sex couples are doing.

I could tell you stories about people who have devoted years of their lives to huddling next to a very ill person in bed, carrying them up and down stairs, cleaning up their spittle, emptying their bedpans at enormous, enormous cost to themselves, far beyond friendship.

Second, I think, as I said before, it's clear that society has an immense stake in removing people from the frontier of vulnerability, and that's where single people are.  I think that Charles will confirm that the data are very clear on this.  The averages are not good for single people in America.  It's not a question of male-female.  It's very largely a question of whether you've got someone looking after you.

Third, it is true that it takes a man and a woman to make a baby, but that cannot be the reason we don't have polygamy.  Men, it turns out, are very happy to marry all of the women they can have babies with, and most societies have been polygamists.  The reason we moved away from polygamy is to democratize marriage, to make it accessible to everybody in society.  And the equal opportunity marriage principle is the principle that gives you a clear boundary that excludes polygamy.  Male-female doesn't do it.

Finally, multiple partners.  Well, first of all, it's not important because nobody wants it.  But, second, the policy reason that that's not a good idea, multiple-partner marriage for homosexuals, is the state interest here and society's interest is in clear responsibility.  If you're married, I know who is responsible for you.  I know who is making the decision in the hospital room about whether to pull the plug, I know who to call, I know who's getting the Social Security pension, I know who has the keys to the house.   Multiple responsibility, shared responsibility means no responsibility, it means conflict, it means decisions don't get made.  You've got to have a buddy system to get the clear reciprocity that will give you the reliability in these relationships.  You don't want people floating in and out of the relationships and saying, "Well, the other person can handle that."

MR. DeMUTH:  I'm going to recognize three final questions or comments.  I'm afraid I've already picked the three--over here, and then the two people in front have been very patient.

MR. BROWN:  Thanks.  Graddon Brown [ph], AEI.

Jonathan, I'm not persuaded that leaving gays with cohabitation as their only option will marginalize marriage.  You, yourself, said that there is nothing keeping heterosexuals from cohabitation, and I thought, well, sure, what used to do that was a social stigma that is largely no longer there or no longer acted upon at least.

And so I think whether heterosexuals choose to cohabit or marry really doesn't have much at all to do with what they observe in gay couples, and it seems to me that it is the heterosexual cohabitation that has become more widespread over the last 20 or 30 years that has really enabled homosexuals to set up households together.  Nobody asks the question any more if a couple is not married, but they're cohabiting.

So I'm wondering why you see a cause-and-effect there when really it seems as though heterosexuals are going to go their own way, cohabitation or marriage, without really much regard for what it is that the homosexuals are doing.

MR. RAUCH:  Do you want to round them up or take--

MR. DeMUTH:  Why don't we do that.

Yes, sir, the two people here at the table.

MR.          :  I just really want to understand, and you may help me with this, I know many couples where the man, later in life, after he's married and has children, come to realize that he's homosexual or maybe he denied it when he was younger because of the horrible situation for homosexuals years ago, but these people have been broken up, and he goes off with a partner, and the woman is left with the children.

Do you know about situations like that?  It just bothers me, that's all, and can you comment on it at all?  I mean, that's what I'm concerned about with many people I have dealt with over the years.

MR. DeMUTH:  With your permission, we'll take the third comment and then turn it over to Jonathan.

Yes, sir?

MR.          :  [?], American Spectator.

I'm curious, if there is an egalitarian civil rights aspect to this, how are you going to make the argument that this should be just tried in one or two states?  I mean, how is that going to work?

MR. DeMUTH:  [Inaudible] I'd overlooked Leon Kass, and he wanted to say a word.

MR. KASS:  There's lots, Jonathan, but let me just confine myself to the formulation given in response to the last question.  It sounds to me like the view of marriage with this kind of commitment--and forgive me for caricaturing this way--is to have a devoted nurse in time of trouble, when things go bad, and certainly that's not unimportant.  But it would seem to me that a traditional understanding is that each partner, whether they know it or not, are bound in a union in which both sacrifice for the new life to come, rather than that they make promises, in fact, for their old age and care.  And I'm not sure that you could make an argument that it is in the state's interest, that it's a matter of state interest.

In fact, Michael Novak, by giving a religious argument, seemed apparently to cede to you that the claims that secular reason would, by itself, be sufficient to make your case.  When asked for a definition of marriage you made a religious appeal.

One wants to know why is the state interested in this mater, and I don't think that the argument that the state is somehow interested--the state is really sufficiently interested in whether my wife and I, in old age, would be committed to one another if it weren't for the fact that we had spent a good time of our time together devoted to launching the next generation.  I think that's the decisive reason why the state is interested in this and that marriage is in big trouble for other reasons is well-known.

But I'm not sure that the i