On the Origins of the Species

On the Origins of the Species

Prime Minister John Howard has argued that marriage's traditional function is to ensure "the survival of the species".

Now it's certainly true that you need couples -- or the sperm and egg of couples -- to procreate, and that, for Christians, marriage is the traditional means by which two people come together in holy matrimony. But, as numerous people have pointed out in the national and state newspapers over the past two days, there are plenty of married couples who can't procreate, or at least, who require artificial means to procreate, including, most controversially, IVF and other medical treatments, but also adoption. And there are many more couples who never intended to have children when they got married, and indeed who never do. As long as the state refrains from revoking the marriage licences of these people, it seems to me that neither the political nor the judicial system has any formal capacity -- by which I mean not only the right but also the grounds -- to restrict marriage to the function of procreation.

But what if, as I think, the PM's claim is underwritten not by a specific concern about civic function at all, but rather by a religious belief? For, despite his pseudo-Darwinian language, I suspect the PM's notion of the species' survival has more to do with the divine charge "to go forth and multiply" than anything else. To avoid accusations that he's yoking the state to his personal religious beliefs, the PM is shrouding those beliefs in quasi-scientific language.

Even here the grounds for his claim are dubious. For the preservation of the species has never been the core 'function' of Christian marriage at all. On the contrary, marriage signals the spiritual consummation of two Christians, who will henceforth grow in their faith together; it's this spiritual consummation that traditionally legitimates the subsequent sexual consummation.

The issue of gay marriage is forcing people to rethink the bases of their religious as well as societal beliefs. And that's why why, for all the attempts for some to dismiss this it as a controversy caused by a fringe group -- the narcissistic warcry of radicals on the periphery, of barbarians at the gate -- the issue raises questions that are central to how we view society as a whole.