The rise in cohabitation may indicate that marriage is becoming irrelevant or an afterthought. The second sign is that seven states, numerous local governments, federal agencies and private employers have extended to unmarried couples homosexual as well as heterosexual pension, health and other benefits comparable to those extended to married couples. DOMA will be challenged in the courts as unconstitutional. The logic of the individualist contraceptive ethic would say no. In the natural order of things, one reason why sex is reserved for marriage and why marriage is between a man and a woman is because sex has an intrinsic relation to babies.
Families play an essential role in society, whose permanence they guarantee.
The traditional family, based on marriage, has been privileged by the law because it is the seedbed for future generations. The partners in a heterosexual de facto union make no comparable binding and public commitments to themselves, their children or society. Lastly, de facto unions between homosexuals are a deplorable distortion of what should be a communion of love and life between a man and a woman in a reciprocal gift open to life. The bond between two men or two women cannot constitute a real family and much less can the right be attributed to that union to adopt children without a family. This is true.