After listening to this week lecture, i started to realize that, the reason modern states hand out officially mandated marriage licenses to couples are to create the stable environments that children require and giving couples freedom and stability themselves. Another important purpose of them is organizing society into units that create social order and force the partners to share responsibilities.
However, the fundamental difference between this view of marriage and its earlier incarnation is that having children is no longer a central part of it. Creating as many children as possible may have provided an economic boon for earlier families, but it doesn’t in an age where children cannot serve any purpose in industry and are merely given mass education to prepare them to take on more sophisticated jobs when they mature (something that would have been unthinkable in antiquity). In modern developed societies infant mortality is effectively nonexistent, and the population climbs at unnaturally high levels. Couples even have the luxury of adopting children with different genes and raising them as their own.
This undermines the critical purpose at the heart of woman and man marriages. If any two people can fulfill the contractual duties of creating stable family units and caring for children, then having marriage be strictly between a man and a woman is not only unnecessary, but socially counter intuitive as well (for if marriage is about a spiritual or social bond, then homosexuals do these things as well). Therefore homosexual couples should be allowed to receive marriage licenses, on no other grounds that they can perform the duties and obligations inherent to it just as effectively as a traditional couple would.
Week 9- Reflective Diary
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