The Inequality of Sexual Relationships: Not All Couples Are Equal

The arguments underlying the recent court rulings in favor of same-sex marriage have all been similarly based on certain premises and understandings evident and implied. The underlying understanding of marriage throughout all civilizations and cultures across the ages is that the marital relationship arises from, and is based on, nature, biology, the natural sexual roles of the two sexes and procreation. 

A basic premise of the same-sex marriage argument relies on abstractions of number and gender, making same-sex couples equal to opposite-sex couples. This would be a valid premise, however, only if the genders, male and female, were sexually equal to each other. But they are not: women get pregnant and bear children; men do not. Men sire children; women do not. Each gender has different and distinct sexual roles and biological functions. Thus, the premise is absurd and the entire argument fails right from the outset due to that fact.

Equality between opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples can be achieved only if the age-old understanding of marriage cited above is redefined and replaced with another understanding, as it is currently being done: that of a state sanctioned, civil contract pertaining to a domestic relationship. The basis of nature, biology, sex and procreation are eliminated from this understanding. 

So, the understanding of marriage pertains either to nature, biology and sex, in which case same-sex couples are not equal to opposite-sex couples, insofar as men and women are not sexually equal to each other; or, that men and women are equal to each other as established by statute and political will, but then, marriage could not pertain to nature, biology and sex where the sexes are unequal. The idea of the equality of same-sex couples to opposite-sex couples essentially redefines sex out of the marital relationship.

The implications of eliminating biology and sex from the marital relationship go beyond same-sex marriage, as the state would no longer have any legitimate reason to deny the right of marriage to polygamous unions or the unions of person of close parentage and other domestic relationships currently denied marriage. Marriage under that circumstance would make it, effectively, a domestic partnership that should be available to all domestic relationships, since it could not be presumed that the relationships, therein, will have the same consequences as the sexual relationship between men and women.

Judges, who are only human, are not necessarily far-sighted or attuned to the logical and material implications of their rulings. A dose of humility is called for, and judges should have an attitude of humility before they overturn millennia of human understanding and tradition.