As historically understood, marriage is aconjugal bond. What does that mean? It means a permanent and exclusive union of man and woman ordered to procreation and the rearing of children…
It is in physical acts of conjugal union — acts that are of the procreative type, whether or not they are procreative in effect — that husband and wife become, to use the language of the Bible, “one flesh.” That, and that alone, is what explains the historic role of consummation in our marriage laws.
The revisionist ideas embodied in the Respect for Marriage Act and the Obergefell decision represent a radically different understanding. “Marriage” is no longer a conjugal bond but is reduced instead to a form of sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership. The revisionist account utterly dissolves the intrinsic connection of marriage to procreation precisely because doing so is necessary to eliminate the norm of sexual complementarity.
If marriage is basically a form of sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership, then there is no reason that a man cannot be married to another man, or a woman to another woman, just as a man and woman can be married. But, by precisely the same token, there is no reason that marriage should be monogamous rather than polyamorous —an ensemble of three or four or five people united as a group in a sexual partnership. If sex (or gender) doesn’t matter, then the number cannot matter either.
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