Supporters of traditional marriage were not just defeated when New York recently redefined marriage to include homosexual unions. Their position was also thoroughly marginalized. Throughout the course of debate, clergy members who worked with gay marriage advocates released statements saying that supporters of traditional marriage were “using religion as a smokescreen to hide their intolerance.” It is certainly a common refrain — even Catholics within New York’s Senate said they had to set their religious beliefs aside to make a “vote of conscience” in favor of “marriage equality.” Yet the failure of progressives to entertain nonreligious arguments for traditional marriage, and the failure of conservatives to make them, gives the incorrect impression that there is little to be said about the purely civic value of the traditional two-parent family as society’s building block.

Such an argument must recognize that traditional marriage’s value is ascertainable to all in a religiously pluralistic society. The argument begins with the question of why the state recognizes marriage at all. It would not be logical for the state to offer special treatment to such one type of relationship based solely on considerations of “love” or “commitment,” or even transfers of wealth and property, which exist in but are neither unique nor in any way peculiar to marriage.