Ruth Institute Blog

by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. from the book of essays, Indivisible–a project of the Heritage Foundation.

Lifelong monogamy was one of the distinctively Christian contributions to Western civilization. Socialists have attacked every aspect of the social order created around the lifelong, sexually exclusive union of a man and a woman. Same-sex marriage, the current hot button issue, is but one of many issues designed to turn marriage into a collection of individuals loosely stapled together by the state. The Left often uses the rhetoric of individual choice and liberty to advance this project. But the rhetoric is not the reality. Deinstitutionalizing marriage will lead to an expansion of the size and scope of the state.

I came to the marriage issue late, and reluctantly. I had been trained in the University of Chicago school of economic thought and had been deeply engaged with the Austrian and Virginia schools of economics. Frankly, I didn’t give the marriage issue much thought until I became a mother. That experience convinced me that we free-market advocates have taken the social institution of marriage far too much for granted.

The Social Problem that Marriage Solves

Marriage is a pre-political, spontaneously arising, universal social institution. The essential purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. Human beings are born alive and immature, through the sexual relations of a man and a woman. Every human child needs adult assistance in order to survive. Marriage exists, in all times and places, to solve this social problem. If our offspring were born as adults, ready to live independently, or if we reproduced through some asexual process, we might not need marriage (though marriage might still be valuable for other reasons).

Find the rest of this article in the book Indivisible at the Heritage Foundation website.