Gay marriage?

Via Insight Scoop, a link to an article from the Winter issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, "What is Marriage?" [the paper is available as a pdf download on this page] by Robert George and Sherif Girgis, both at Princeton, and Ryan Anderson of the University of Notre Dame. Those interested in serious argument about gay marriage as a public policy issue will find the article and the exchanges about it worthy of attention. Insight Scoop provides the abstract:

In the article, we argue that as a moral reality, marriage is the union of a man and a woman who make a permanent and exclusive commitment to each other of the type that is naturally fulfilled by bearing and rearing children together, and renewed by acts that constitute the behavioral part of the process of reproduction. We further argue that there are decisive principled as well as prudential reasons for the state to enshrine this understanding of marriage in its positive law, and to resist the call to recognize as marriages the sexual unions of same-sex partners.

Besides making this positive argument for our position and raising several objections to the view that same-sex unions should be recognized, we address what we consider the strongest philosophical objections to our view of the nature of marriage, as well as more pragmatic concerns about the point or consequences of implementing it as a policy.

Their argument elicited considerable criticism to which the authors responded. Also from Insight Scoop:

• “What is Marriage?” original article in HJLPP
• The Argument Against Gay Marriage: And Why it Doesn’t Fail first response to Yoshino
• Marriage: Merely a Social Construct? Response to Northwestern Law Prof Andy Koppelman
• Marriage: Real Bodily Union Response to Family Scholars blogger Barry Deutsch
• Marriage: No Avoiding the Central Question Response to second Yoshino

Insight Scoop | The Ignatius Press Blog: Important debate about the nature of marriage