They may in early life learn these patterns and performances, which thereby enable them to enact and reenact commitments in their own experience. With marriage a social engine of destruction is halted, and the cycle of restoration is restarted. Illegitimacy brings forth children into the welfare state without fathers, without protectors, and without the human web of covenanted public commitment. It is the antithesis of marriage and community, rending our social life, and offering up the child as fodder for predators, criminal and sexual. Marriage, in contrast, is an institutional arrangement that is both legal and moral, and therefore at the exact intersection of church and state.
Several domains meet here in a nexus of sexuality, sacredness, companionship, and economic contract.
Through marriage these domains are ordered and legitimated, as are the children who enter society through this choreographed arrangement. The social patterns found in marriage grow out of preexisting moral feelings of the actors who join. But at the same time, the patterns enacted through this institution harbor and nourish just those moral sentiments which ensure its replication. We should no longer ignore the lesson of history. In the absence of marriage, many things have unraveled.