Ryan Anderson: What's next for marriage?

Ryan Anderson, a Heritage Foundation senior research fellow, is the author of the newly released Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom (Regnery). Anderson, 33, received a BA from Princeton and a Ph.D. from Notre Dame. This interview was in front of students at Patrick Henry College. We’ll publish three other parts of the interview at wng.org during the week of Oct. 12.

In 1973, following the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, many pundits essentially said, “The abortion debate is over, decided, done. Everyone will live happily ever after.” That meant millions of unborn children would die, and 42 years later the debate rolls on. How is the Court’s 2015 establishment of same-sex marriage like that? Both rulings were unjustified. You can read through the Constitution closely and you’ll never find a right to privacy that results in the right to kill a child in the womb. That was just legislating from the bench. In the same way, read the due process clause and maybe the protection clause. Read the history of the 14th Amendment. Nothing in there says “redefine the nature of marriage.” Both these questions were simply issues our Constitution doesn’t speak to, so “We, the people” are supposed to debate, deliberate, and then vote about them.

The abortion ruling led to many religious liberties conflicts. We forget now that in the late ’70s and early ’80s activists on the left were saying, “Abortion is healthcare like any other healthcare procedure. All doctors, all nurses, all hospitals, all health insurance programs should be mandated to perform or fund abortions.” It was an open question at the time whether you could be a pro-life physician, a pro-life nurse, a pro-life hospital. Thankfully, pro-lifers won that debate through a variety of protections, and we established something of a consensus that pro-life citizens shouldn’t be coerced by the government to pay for or to perform abortions.

In what ways is the same-sex marriage debate different? My sense is that it’s easier for pro-lifers to make the case for life than it will be for marriage people. You can frame the abortion debate very naturally within the framework that is our natural currency for political discourse: rights, as in the right to life. Marriage is about an institution that protects the well-being of individuals, and we have a much harder time explaining how this institution of marriage promotes and protects human well-being by protecting the child’s right to a mom and a dad and avoiding the harms associated with nonmarital child-rearing. It’s more dots to connect.

Let’s connect more dots. One reason we’re winning on the abortion issue, slowly, is that the United States has a history of increasing inclusion—religious, ethnic, racial. Protecting unborn children increases inclusion, but the gay lobby has successfully portrayed opposition to homosexuality as exclusion. How do you deal with that? Your history is largely right, but the feminist movement narrative says enlarging the circle to include women as full and equal citizens means a right to reproductive choice and now you are trying to take that away. Still, our pro-life narrative works better because we clearly include women in our community, and the question is: Does the inclusion of women as equal citizens entail the exclusion of unborn children? Over time we’ll make progress in winning that.

But the marriage debate is harder. The problem is that we’re engaging the marriage debate 40 years too late. Gays and lesbians aren’t to blame for the problems that our marriage culture faces: It’s heterosexuals who bought liberal ideology during the sexual revolution of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Only after 40 years of the cultural redefinition of marriage could you have five Supreme Court justices legally redefine marriage. But little by little people are seeing the sexual revolution hasn’t been good for women, children, or men. The question becomes: How can we actually recover a more humane meaning of sexuality? That’s a challenge, but it can’t just be taking marriage away from gays and lesbians: It’s recovering a sound understanding of marriage for everyone. If we can’t do that, marriage dissolves into contract law of whatever size or shape the consenting adults choose to consent to.

‘Only after 40 years of the cultural redefinition of marriage could you have five Supreme Court justices legally redefine marriage.’

No-fault divorce brought us a strange type of contract that could be broken unilaterally by one party. Prior to no-fault divorce we had the three A’s—abuse, abandonment, and adultery—as serious reasons for a union expected as permanent to be declared over by the government. The expectation was, “Till death do you part.” Coming out of this ’60s sexual revolution you see spouses not saying “for as long as we both shall live” but “for as long as we both shall love.”

The current expression, “love makes a family,” grows out of that. And if love equals love, why not add in another equal sign to make a throuple? How about “wedlease,” an idea introduced in The Washington Post two years ago? A wedlease would be a 5-year marriage contract that you could renew if you wanted to, but otherwise it has a presumption of ending after five years: lease a house, lease a car, lease a spouse.

If you say marriage is only for two people, will you be labeled a “twoist”? Or “polyphobe.” Lawsuits currently in the federal courts may lead to constitutional rights of polygamy.

The growth of pregnancy resource centers that offer compassionate alternatives to abortion has led to a drop in the number of abortions, particularly when the centers offer ultrasound pictures. How can the Bible-based marriage movement show compassion? Studies by Mark Regnerus and others are showing that children do best with their married mother and father. We now see adult children of gays and lesbians saying, “I love my two moms, but I wish I would have had a mom and a dad.” Single parenting or divorce show human frailty, but with same-sex marriage you now create an institution to deprive a child either of a mother or a father, not through human frailty, but intentionally.

How can we be compassionate toward people who have same-sex attractions but want to be chaste? For too long the church didn’t know what to do, but people like Wesley Hill and Eve Tushnet are working on this. There is a universal need for community, for relationships—and if people who are same-sex attracted aren’t going to get married, how do we welcome them into our homes? Everyone on Thanksgiving and Christmas needs somewhere to go. How will we welcome gays and lesbians at our dining room table? It’s important that the church have a compassionate tangible response, in the same way you’ve looked at crisis pregnancy centers.

So Christians need to think, act, and speak? Many Christians have gone silent. If we’re not speaking for ourselves, someone else will. If you’re a secular liberal and all you’ve heard about the gay marriage debate is “God hates fags,” it’s reasonable to think we’re all bigots.

For more from this interview, see “Growing up Ryan Anderson,” “Ryan Anderson on natural law,” and “Silence kills: More from Ryan Anderson.”