Source: http://kindlefrenzy.weebly.com/blog/category/marriage
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 17:15:10+00:00

Document:
§1. The consummation of some 50 years of legal and cultural activism, SCOTUS has just ruled the biological factor in marriage irrelevant. Marriage is now officially reduced to a merely affective union, maybe permanent, maybe exclusive, maybe fruitful, heck, for that matter maybe even affective or maybe not. In principle, it is now no more than a legal contract on par with any other, stipulating whatever to whomever for any reason whatsoever.
§2. And as for affection: why, oh why, must we ask the state to recognize our love for one another? Or rather specifically those forms of love currently on headlines? Because wouldn't it naturally follow to demand the state to recognize my intense feelings of love for my nephew? To deploy fleets of lawyers to officially declare our love of chocolate truffles and scratchy Barry Manilow records?
§3. Of all possible pairings of human beings, exactly one is capable of acts reproductive in kind if not in fact; and when these acts do result in children the burden on the parents is so enormous, and the rights and demands of the child (including to know, love and be loved by his/her own biological parents where possible) so profound, and the impact on society so foundational (family instability, for instance, being one of the great predictors of future criminality)...Is it not irrational to fail to create a privileged institution promoting the formation and maintenance of stable families? Should we really allow exceptions to trump ideals that clearly flow from the reality of our bodies?
§4. And further: does not this official rejection of the biological mark one further step in our collective Cartesian error, according to which the body merely a sub-personal aspect of ourselves, so much raw material to be employed according to our will, tastes and whims? That the body has nothing of consequence to tell us about ourselves, that it gives us no norms but those instrumental to our disembodied dreams? For this is surely one of the great ironies, that by attending too closely to the body's passions we lose sight of what the body is.
§5. I consider it great progress that our children can come to understand their sexuality free of some of yesterday's stifling tabus (and they were at times, and sadly even remain, very cruel). But to genuinely, objectively flourish as humans, to discover our deepest identity, we must also discover the virtue of temperance, by which along with the other virtues--prudence, justice, fortitude, faith, hope and love--we shall come to be who we truly are. Our deepest identity is neither straight nor gay--those crude categories introduced by 19th century social scientist in their emulation of physical science; it is rather that we are such beings as, though cultivation of the virtues, to find our completion in the gaze of that which is Being itself, face to face, πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον.
For another approach to §5, see Cynthia Buttjer's post on the relationship of marriage and happiness.
Over at First Things, James Kalb swaps out my critique of Cartesianism (§4) with a look at technocracy.
Full disclosure: §3 borrows heavily from Robert George in his "Clash of the Orthodoxies"

References: §2

§3

§4

§5
 §5
 §3