It would be a mistake to judge Michael Pakaluk’s article primarily as a “religious” argument.  It’s true that Michael Pakaluk is a devout Catholic, but I’ve bumped into two people just in my social circle who are atheists who are anti-gay marriage and buy his argument completely.  For the sake of discussion, I will call it the “socially conservative” argument against gay marriage.  Like the Buddhist arguments against drinking and casual sex that we’ll read next week, these perspectives might be religious in origin, but they have taken on their own life entirely apart from any religious framework.

At the heart of Pakaluk’s opinion is an observation that there are two different models for what marriage should be:

(1) “The founding of a family.”  Most societies in recorded history do not appear to have written much about how much people loved each other.  Marriages, not just of the powerful but also of the poor, were about starting families together; people traditionally have married very young, and the purpose of marriage was to create a stable family environment for children.

(2) “Long term erotic friendship.”  What marriage has increasingly become.  Consider this: if you are pro gay-marriage, why do gay people have the “right” to get married?  To put it more basically, why should gay people be allowed to marry; what is the most simple, immediate response to this question?  Pakaluk would assert that it is because they love each other.  “Love” in this case is erotic love.  Erotically loving someone gives you the right to get married, the argument goes.

Call this the “paleo diet” of anti-gay marriage arguments.  People who believe in the paleo diet, when confronted with compelling evidence that another diet is as good or better, usually fall back on the argument: it’s what we did for tens of thousands of years; other diets are recent; therefore, it must be more natural; therefore, it must be better.

Homosexuality has undoubtedly been around for tens of thousands of years.  But marriage has, until just the last few decades, always, in every civilization, and in every primitive tribe, in all of recorded history and what we know of the history of hunter-gatherer’s before recorded history, meant one, and only one, thing: The founding of a family between a man and one or more women.

A man may bond with his hunting or business partner, and there are various words for this bond; in Greece, the relations between two male soldiers were sometimes celebrated, and were certainly considered to be “love” in the sense of eros.  Homosexuality was celebrated and encouraged in so many ways in Greece…But marriage?  Perhaps the most sexually permissive society in the Western ancient world never even thought of the idea.  This was because marriage had only a limited amount to do with erotic love; it was supposed to be about founding a family.

Now obviously, gay men and lesbians can adopt children and can have their own children through surrogacy and insemination.  Pakaluk is not blind to these realities, which brings me back to refocusing on the heart of his argument: the problem with gay marriage is that it changes the basic essence of marriage.  It changes it to meaning long-term erotic friendship, with anyone of any age and gender, as opposed to the privileged place it has always had: a man and woman (or women) wanting to procreate.  Marriage is sliding away from the rock-solid humble commitment that makes families work into this wishy-washy territory of Finding True Love, which has destroyed families to a significant extent.

Eichenwald in Vanity Fair is addressing exactly this sort of socially conservative argument.  I think that his arguments, and indeed most arguments in favor of gay marriage, are quite easily understood.  I spend more time parsing out Pakaluk’s argument out of a belief that most of you are either pro gay-marriage or already have some understanding as to why so many young people are (81% is a pretty solid statistic on this issue for age 18-29, which is probably at least 90% of this class.).