This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2004, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Who anticipated the rapid sequence of events that in early 2004 brought hundreds of homosexual couples - in Massachusetts, California, New York, Oregon and elsewhere - before officials willing to pronounce them married? Sympathetic observers have lauded these couples for their bravery; the unsympathetic have marveled at their brazenness.

Conservative groups have set in motion initiatives to prohibit further homosexual marriages and to invalidate those that have occurred. But amid all of the commentators praising or damning homosexuals for breaking the marriage barrier, few have reflected on just what kind of institution homosexuals are now claiming.

If Americans scrutinize the way our culture has re-defined wedlock, they may well conclude that it is not homosexuals who have changed so much as marriage itself. Seen from this perspective, homosexual weddings constitute the predictable culmination of cultural changes that have radically de-natured wedlock.

Only the ideologically blind would deny that homosexual marriage threatens the traditions that defined wedlock for millennia. Homosexual activists themselves assert that they aim at more than a mere aping of heterosexual marriage: They want homosexual marriage to "destabilize marriage's gendered definition."

But the destabilization of marriage hardly began with homosexual unions. To those who have been paying attention to what American culture, legislation, and jurisprudence have been doing to wedlock since at least the 1960s, homosexual marriage looks like the coup de grace administered only after judges, educators, therapists, activists, and entertainers have already done their worst.

Once strongly reinforced by both religion and law, marriage stood for centuries as the socially obligatory institution that shaped the individual for an adulthood of self-sacrifice and cooperative, home-centered labor focused on child-bearing and child-rearing.

However, by the late 20th century, the American supports for marriage had weakened. The breadwinner/homemaker division of labor (a vestige of the husband-wife division of labor on the once-numerous family farms) came under cultural and economic assault as labor union leaders, employers and government officials turned against the "family wage" system which once paid a married father enough to support an at-home wife and their numerous children. New policies favored female employment and two-career homes.

As mothers moved into paid employment, the social roles of parents became increasingly indistinguishable. In economic terms, many American children had two "fathers" long before advocates of homosexual marriage ever attempted to give children two biologically male parents. The obliteration of the economic distinction between husband and wife also inevitably suppressed the biological event that most forcibly defined gender differences: childbirth.

Marital fertility plummeted, helping (along with Roe v. Wade) to push overall fertility in the United States below replacement level in what some have called "a birth dearth."

Divorce rates shot up in the '60s and '70s even as compliant lawmakers enacted no-fault divorce statutes reducing wedlock to a legal revolving door. For the first time, the state actually allied itself with spouses who wished to sever marital ties.

Meanwhile, federal policymakers undermined wedlock with welfare policies subsidizing the mother-state-child family in which Uncle Sam served as surrogate husband and father. Even as overall fertility languished, out-of-wedlock births soared.

Perhaps even more damaging to wedlock than the changes in law and economics was the cultural erosion of religious commitment. Sociologists have reported not only a decline in church attendance among young adults in recent decades but also a softening of doctrinal orthodoxy.

By the 1990s, marriage had lost so much of its cultural substance that for many it hardly seemed worth the bother. Between 1970 and 2000, the marriage rate dropped an astonishing 40 percent. Some homosexual couples have even asked, "Why should we scramble to get onto a sinking ship?" But homosexual couples seeking to be married do so precisely because the traditional freight of marriage - complementary gender roles, work in a real home economy, child-bearing, sexual fidelity, permanence - has been thrown overboard as the marital ship has settled ever lower in the water.

The de-natured thing that marriage has become now offers insurance, employment, lifestyle, and government benefits while imposing none of the traditional obligations.

Many Americans oppose homosexual marriage because it undermines the social institution that has always meant bride and groom. Their views are understandable. But unless these Americans are prepared to undo the cultural harm done to wedlock over four decades, their fight against homosexual marriage will fail.

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Bryce Christensen, Ph.D., is a contributing editor for The Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society in Rockford, Ill. He teaches English at Southern Utah University in Cedar City.

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