That said, my proposal doesn’t touch on the subject of donor conception. Nothing that is currently done to have children is affected by my proposal, only things that haven’t been done yet, like cloning and genetic engineering and attempting same-sex and transgender procreation using stem cells. It is consistent with ending gamete donation someday in the future in that it affirms that marriage is the right to conceive people, but it doesn’t actually prohibit unmarried people from doing it anyway.

In a related matter a commenter by the name of “Hardcastle” posted the following over at NRO. I haven’t given it much thought, but at first glance, I like it:

The discussion here has touched on artificial insemination several times, and I do have a suggestion to improve our public policy concerning it. My suggestion would not resolve all the problems associated with artificial insemination, but I believe it would rectify a lot of them and produce a net good.

Although I have reservations about sperm donation even pursuant to my policy, I can’t see how, as a practical matter, to stop it altogether. And I think my suggestion is entirely fair to the sperm donors — no less than we expect from others who father children. Our legal system stands ready to ruin divorced fathers, even in situations where the mother has unilaterally broken up the marriage. Why do we let sperm donors off the hook?

We need people to be aware that marriage means allowing the couple to conceive offspring together and that the ultimate demand by same-sex marriage activists is to be allowed to create children with someone of the other sex (and by transgender activists, to be allowed to reproduce as their chosen sex). People aren’t aware that labs are working on ways to coax stem cells into viable sperm for a woman or eggs for a man, and if they are aware, they often seem to think we have to let people do it if they want to. It is the same attitude of Douglas, that if someone wants to own slaves, we have to let them, or if a state says it is OK, or the people say it is OK, then it’s OK. But it isn’t OK and it isn’t inevitable, we need to explain to people why it is unethical and wrong and would be terrible public policy to allow.

Please let me know what you think of my proposal to resolve the marriage debate with what I call The Egg and Sperm Civil Union Compromise. It preserves marriage as a man and a woman through a combination of three laws that prohibit genetic engineering (the Egg and Sperm law), affirm marriage’s conception rights, and federally recognizes state Civil Unions as long as they are defined as “marriage minus conception rights” so they are not equivalent to marriage and affirm the unique right of marriage to conceive offspring together.

So how does this actually compare to slavery and Kansas? Unlike Lecompton, I haven’t heard anyone argue that the ballots won on electorial faud. I suppose you have a point that someone who makes an anti-SSM based on a case against judicial activism would have little to oppose by SSM becoming legal through totally non-judicial means.

But I think the comparision is more self-serving than anything else. Anything to pretend you’re Lincoln fighting slavery or Churchill fighting Hitler. Where this doesn’t work so well is that anti-SSM were all too happy to embrace the ‘proceduralists’ when they were arguing against SSM via attacking judicial activism and arguing in favor of allowing ballots banning SSM to stand. This is a bit like arguing in favor of settling arguments by sword fighting, until one realizes that the other side has acquired some better swordsmen and now it’s suddenly barbaric to use sword fighting to settle such arguments!

It is astounding how many–even on the Right–are indifferent to having our government redefine the very natural rights it was created to protect. Does a computer get to redefine the value of the man who programmed it?

As Tocqueville’s contemporary Fr. Francis Grund once wrote, you need only change the morals and habits of the American people and you could change their government utterly without altering a single word of their constitution.

I was introduced to my favorite defender of marriage, Douglas Farrow, through an article he wrote for Touchstone magazine. Farrow understands in no uncertain terms why this debate strikes at the heart of our freedom. It is so discouraging to see the Wall Street Journal treat writers like you and Farrow as if they are the troglodytes of the movie Mississippi Burning.

Farrow’s Touchstone article was somewhat heavy reading. A friend of mine read it but said he couldn’t quite sum up what Farrow was saying, although he liked the article a great deal. The following is my attempt to draw a picture summing up that article.