Marriage matters

Interview | Author David Blankenhorn argues in a new book against same-sex marriage—and for leaving homosexuality out of the debate | Marvin Olasky

The New York Times described David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, as a "consensus builder for a moral base in society," and he is true to form in The Future of Marriage (Encounter, 2007). He marshals strong secular arguments against proponents of same-sex marriage and undermines their rhetorical claim—but are those arguments strong enough?

WORLD: You write that "across cultures, marriage is above all a procreative institution. It is nothing less than the culturally constructed linchpin of all human family and kinship systems." What is some of the anthropological evidence for that?

BLANKENHORN: To write this book, I spent a year studying what the great anthropologists have concluded about marriage. In particular, I wanted to learn what, if any, are the common features of marriage across human societies. What is always a core purpose of marriage, in every known human society? Here is the answer: Everywhere, marriage exists in large part to ensure that the woman and the man whose sexual union makes the child, stay together in a cooperative union to raise the child. Another way to put it is that, through marriage, biological parents also become legal and social parents. This finding is widely shared—it is not really controversial—among the leading scholars of marriage in the modern period.