What is marriage? After a thorough exploration of definitions, David Blankenhorn offered his own in his book, “The Future of Marriage,” published in 2007 when he still thought that marriage so defined had a future:
“In all or nearly all human societies, marriage is socially approved sexual intercourse between a woman and a man, conceived both as a personal relationship and as an institution, primarily such that any children resulting from the union are—and are understood by the society to be—emotionally, morally, practically, and legally affiliated with both of the parents. That’s what marriage is. It’s a way of living rooted in the fundamental physiological and biochemical adaptations of our species, as developed over the course of our long prehistory.”
Note that Blankenhorn is not describing the elevated view of marriage in Judeo-Christian orthodoxy, as presented in sacred and secular works, such as the “Song of Songs,” the comedies of Shakespeare, and Milton’s “Paradise Lost“—works that emphasize the delight of man and wife in each other, the dance of the sexes, not their chronic contempt for each other. Blankenhorn simply sets out the basic elements of marriage, not only in Judeo-Christian sexual morality, but also as it was codified in the earliest known legal codes and has been understood always and everywhere for the past 5,000 years—but is no more. The sexual revolution of the 1960s, with the Pill, pornography, and the normalization of almost every kind of sex in and out of marriage, broke the basic natural links in Blankenhorn’s definition, and with that, the idea of the sexes being made for each other, coming together in a sexual union ordered to the bearing and raising of children and a commitment to each other and to any children that resulted.
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