What Is Marriage?

Douglas Farrow has some wise observations about the same-sex marriage debate in his Touchstone review of Girgis, Anderson, and George, What Is Marriage?

He commends the authors’ courage and insight, and is thoroughly in agreement with their effort to defend traditional marriage.

But Farrow doesn’t think that the book hits the problem head-on because it “brackets” the question of homosexuality. The authors are trying to avoid the charge of bigotry, but Farrow notes that they’ll be labeled bigots anyway, since their opponents “know full well that the conjugal view of marriage militates against the normalization both of homosexual acts and (as the authors remind us, albeit only in support of their claim that the debate is not about homosexuality or the morality thereof) of certain heterosexual acts. So why avoid any of this? Why not engage the opposition on the ground they actually hold most dear?”

He suggests that the bracketing comes from the authors’ “determination to restrict themselves to philosophy, and to restrict their philosophy in such a way as to isolate it from controversy about right and wrong; in short, to make significant concessions to secularism’s suspension of moral judgment. It can be argued, however, that this suspension itself is but a feint on the field of battle and should rather be exposed as such.” Farrow says the authors are “more astute when they say that there is ‘no neutral marriage policy’ – which is just as true morally and theologically as it is philosophically or politically.”

Defenses of marriage cannot avoid theology. Marriage has itself has become, as Francesca Murphy recently put it, an article of faith.