In addition to court decisions, civil union or domestic partnership laws in some states (sometimes themselves the products of court decisions) have given same-sex couples the same child rearing rights as opposite-sex couples. These laws directly contribute to the undercutting of traditional marriage, which has always and everywhere been understood to be linked to procreation and the raising of children.

We should remind ourselves of just what is at stake in the mad judicial effort to re-lay the foundations of civilization and human life itself. All regimes have an interest in maintaining a proper understanding of marriage insofar as they have an interest in maintaining themselves. And marriage properly understood is a dictate of natural law, which suggests a primary purpose and desire of man qua man is the propagation of the species. The institution of marriage exists for the purpose of this propagation, and with it, the preservation of the commonwealth, among other things. Marriage is the legal tie that binds natural, i.e., opposite-sex, couples who use their characteristic sexual virtues and aptitudes for the benefit of their children. These children are to be raised as responsible citizens who in turn play their parts in support of personal and civilizational flourishing.

Furthermore, in requiring that same-sex couples have the right to call themselves married, courts have engaged in a kind of nominalism that is unknown to the common law. The material benefits of marriage can be conferred through civil union status rather than actual marriage. This means that the courts in Canada, Massachusetts, and California have asserted a stunning claim: the right to a noun. The arguments advanced by the courts’ majority opinions have less to do with constitutional documents or constitutional reasoning, and more to do with the Orwellian desire to police the English language, allowing parties the legal entitlement to label themselves as they see fit. This revolutionary development in effect gives courts the right to control the contents of the Oxford English Dictionary.

As Orwell foresaw, political manipulation of language is essential to the full range of thought control. It is likely that Americans soon (and it is already coming to pass in the under-30 age group) will no longer have any conception of marriage as is once was, from the beginning of time. And with this destruction of language goes the last enforced legal distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the very possibility that anyone can maintain moral distinctions between the two kinds of activity. The natural order itself becomes a matter for our creation, and re-creation. As mutual consent becomes the only touchstone of human life, almost anything becomes possible in the moral realm. And all this, of course, is part of the agenda of the advocates of same-sex “marriage.”

Conservatives who argue that the legal requirements for marriage ought to be a matter for state determination are foolhardy. This version of a states’ rights argument ignores the fact that same-sex “marriage” comes not from voter choice, but from judicial fiat. This seemingly pro-federalism position does not really serve the interests of federalism. Same-sex couples mar­ried in one state will invariably seek to have those marriages (and the incidents thereof, including child custody decrees) enforced in states that do not rec­ognize such marriages. For traditional marriage to survive, at least in some states, these states must ignore the court orders of other states, which will likely not be constitutionally possible. As Lincoln said of another fundamental moral question, “this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” In short, for both marriage and self-government on marital questions to survive, a federal constitutional amendment will be required.