The Holy Grail for those pushing the trend towards amorality is same-sex marriage. That eventuality appears all but certain — absent amending the Constitution — given the Supreme Court’s expansive decision striking down legislation prohibiting homosexual acts.

Justice Scalia’s vigorous dissent presciently notes that if morality is a matter of individual choice, the rule of law is superfluous. Doubtless the Justice now clearly perceives that which his agenda-oriented colleagues are disinclined to acknowledge. The assault on marriage is the “Shock and Awe” strategy of forces determined to turn civilization on its head. Simply combining the words “self” and “evident” will come to be viewed as political extremism at its worst. Consider the same-sex marriage proponent who, in a respected national publication, adduces the purpose of the Supreme Court as: “that of clearing out the dust of the past and remaking the world afresh.”1 Does anyone actually believe it will stop at same-sex marriage? That the “progressive”’ alliance in favor of same-sex marriage opposes same-sex education is more than a little disconcerting.

Precedent requires courts of law to base decisions upon relatively intricate explication of law and fact, and common sense is often a casualty of this process. Common sense, nonetheless, cannot help but counsel that same-sex marriage is untenable.

The heterosexual marital relationship, with all its imperfections, constitutes the bedrock of civilization. Marriage — female wife and mother, male husband and father — is the basic social unit. Redefining marriage is akin to tampering with root arithmetic: no Court would have the temerity to do so. Marriage, in both fact and law, is a covenant between a man and a woman — a uniquely exclusive product of the heterosexual relationship at the interior of which is the innocence and vulnerability of the child.

The mere fact that some groups are not inclined towards this elemental definition of marriage does not grant them the right to redefine marriage. Undeterred, same-sex marriage proponents claim kinship with victims of race and gender discrimination. While such arguments make sense where State action bars homosexuals from marrying the opposite sex, or grants only a single gender the right to same-sex marriage, interracial marriage and women’s suffrage, in stark contrast to same-sex marriage, did not necessitate redefining marriage or voting, but merely accepting the self-evident truth that race and gender are not relevant to behavior.

Homosexuality is defined by behavior. Whether one deems homosexuality virtuous or aberrant, therefore, those who consider themselves homosexual are not discriminated against by prohibiting same-sex marriage. All men and women, regardless of sexual preference, are afforded the same opportunity to partake of the marriage covenant. (An opportunity that would cease only if the State prohibited homosexuals from marrying the opposite sex.) That persons of the same sex — whether bisexual, heterosexual, or homosexual — cannot marry each other is intrinsic to the self-evident definition of the marriage covenant. Prohibiting same-sex marriage does not discriminate against the person, but against the person’s behavior — and that only to the extent of refusing to demolish the existential foundations of gender and thus of stable family life. Every Justice on today’s Supreme Court understands, even if each tournament were played on a Public Course, that the Equal Protection Clause does not
grant males the right to play in the LPGA or females the right to play in the PGA. (Nor does it grant anyone the right to play either tour with a whiffle ball.) It simply grants the equal right to play golf. If the Court has no business redefining the game of golf, it certainly has no business redefining the covenant of marriage. Civil rights, after all, have never been about fabricating radically restructured definitions: civil rights is substantiating self-evident truths. Recognizing same-sex marriage makes a mockery of both marriage and civil rights.

The comparison between same-sex marriage and bisexual polygamous marriage is strikingly cogent. The person who claims legitimacy for same-sex marriage, if he or she is to remain consistent, must also claim legitimacy for bisexual polygamous marriage — thus exposing the fact that the basis of their position is not an affirmation of civil rights, but a nihilistic indifference toward foundational values. Same-sex marriage proponents are aware of the attendant flood of culturally perverse legal challenges that recognizing same-sex marriage invites. On what credibly remaining basis will the Court strike them down?

How can one declare same-sex marriage objectively legitimate while declaring the resultant basis of bisexual polygamous marriage illegitimate? Advocating same-sex marriage yet refusing to fully extend it to bisexuals is commensurate to advocating drugs be legalized — for whites only. The “evolving norms” rationale applied by the majority in striking down Texas’ anti-sodomy legislation is at least as applicable to legalizing private drug use.

Bisexuality is not a quasi-static vacillation between heterosexuality and homosexuality, but a preference for both genders. Once same-sex marriage is recognized as having a legitimate basis, prohibiting bisexual polygamous marriage becomes logically incoherent. The legal argument will proceed as follows:

Because of “who they are,” bisexuals cannot have their need for love and companionship completed by a single gender. While it is legitimate to marry a person of the same-sex, and legitimate to marry a person of the opposite sex, it is a criminal offense to marry both. This is an archetypal subjective and discriminatory distinction: no pronouncements against thebehavior, but limiting its scope to particular classes of persons.

Conversely, a corresponding suit brought on behalf of traditional polygamists would be nonsensical: the heterosexual’s need for love, companionship, and procreation, is complete with one partner. Nevertheless, as bisexuals gain the right to polygamy, the Equal Protection Clause, consistently applied in a radically gender-neutral manner, obliges polygamy be extended to heterosexuals and homosexuals as well: marriage, in all but name, thus effectively annihilated.2

Same-sex marriage proponents astutely evade the implications of bisexual marriage and its inherent relevance to polygamy. Customary denials notwithstanding, at the core of the same-sex marriage argument rests the consequent presumption that — irrespective of ontological, sociological, or physiological contradictions — any grouping of adults who claim to love each other have an implicit right to marriage. The Constitution, however, neither adopts nor advances the self-canceling practice of defining reality void of epistemological standards. If the Supreme Court recognizes same-sex marriage, it diminishes both the rule of law — and its own existence. Rather than acquiesce in the Court’s blatant forays into deconstructionism, it is not unthinkable that an exasperated electorate might amend the Constitution to provide Congress and the President emergency veto power over increasingly strident judicial legislating.

The issue is not that people of the same sex might love each other, the issue is requiring society as a whole to declare by law that sex is a natural or necessary aspect of that love. Hence, the question is not one of civil rights. The question — slowly materializing through the fog of postmodern self-induced apathy — is shall we indoctrinate America’s children with the philosophy that marrying the same sex is equivalent to marrying the opposite sex — and catapult ourselves towards becoming a people unwilling to discern left from right. While the answer is clearly a matter of common sense, it appears both clarity and common sense are about to be tossed into the dustbin of history. Perhaps the message posted on a church announcement board just outside Martha’s Vineyard put it best: “Those who Stand for Nothing will Fall for Anything.”

2. In “Beyond Gay Marriage,” The Weekly Standard, 8/45, author Stanley Kurtz powerfully documents the astonishing case that a determined assemblage of legal scholars, academics, and activists, is already eagerly preparing the “polyamory” offensive — and deftly appropriating same-sex marriage as their Trojan Horse.