In the Public Square: Responsible Voices on Family Issues
Marriage Safe in the Empire State
by William C. Duncan
On July 6, 2006, the New York Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) issued a 4-2 decision that the state’s marriage law limiting marriage to only a man and a woman is constitutional and that its critics needed to address their concerns to the state legislature. Shortly thereafter, the Georgia Supreme Court issued a brief ruling that the state’s marriage amendment was valid, reversing a contrary decision by a judge in Atlanta. June 6th was a good day for marriage and the law.
The New York decision is particularly careful and well written. The main opinion squarely addressed the main question: whether there were any valid reasons for the state to protect marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
The court concluded that there are “at least two grounds that rationally support the limitation on marriage that the legislature has enacted” and that both were premised on “the undisputed assumption that marriage is important to the welfare of children.” First, since “[h]eterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children” and “homosexual intercourse does not,” the legislature “could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born” by offering an inducement to opposite-sex couples to marry. The court noted that the same considerations do not apply to same-sex couples because they cannot have children without intending to do so.
The court’s second ground for believing the marriage law rational is that the legislature “could rationally believe that it is better, other things being equal, for children to grow up with both a mother and a father” since “[i]intuition and experience suggest that a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like.” Despite exceptions to this pattern, the court held, the legislature could find that “the general rule will usually hold.”
The day before the New York decision, advocates of redefining marriage were touting the endorsement of a group of pediatricians for their radical goal. They argue that social science evidence shows that family structure is not as important for children’s well being as our inherited understanding of marriage suggests.
This same argument had been urged on the New York court. The court, however, responded forcefully. The main opinion noted that social science studies “on their face do not establish beyond doubt that children fare equally well in same-sex and opposite-sex households,” but rather show “that rather limited observation has detected no marked difference.”
The court said that the plaintiffs in the case “seem to assume that
they have demonstrated the irrationality” of the idea that marriage
benefits children “by showing there is no scientific evidence to support
it,” but the court noted that “[i]n the absence of conclusive
scientific evidence, the Legislature could rationally proceed on the common-sense
premise that children will do best with a mother and father in the home.”
When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court redefined marriage in that state,
it did so after alleging that the historical understanding of marriage was
completely irrational and thus could only be based on prejudice or bigotry.
The New York decision marks the first time since the Massachusetts ruling that a state’s highest court has ruled on the constitutionality of marriage. Thus, it is very significant that this court flatly rejected the claim of irrationality. In fact, the court refused to “lightly conclude that everyone who held [a belief that marriage is the union of a man and a woman] was irrational, ignorant or bigoted.”
The bluff of redefinition advocates has now been called and New York has conclusively demonstrated that a conscientious court can understand the societal interests served by defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. We can only hope that the courts of other states where similar cases are pending will pay attention.
Mr. Duncan is director of the Marriage Law Foundation (www.marriagelawfoundation.org)
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