In light of Eric's comments on gay marriage, specifically regarding the legal side of the question, I thought I should link to this piece by Jennifer Roback Morse at Policy Journal Online, "Marriage and the Limits of Contract."

It strikes me that the author has an agenda (she has published two books on love) and makes the same mistake as many Marxists, viz. reducing issues to pale economic analogies. Oddly, also like a Marxist, she treats Smith's Inquiry as the capitalist equivalent of the Communist Manifesto, suggesting that free market systems are 'built on the ideas in the Wealth of Nations.' That sort of illogic leaves me on the alert.

That's secondary, but gives a glimpse into the author's muddled argument.

What about sex?:

There are analogous truths about human sexuality. I claim the sexual urge is a natural engine of sociability, which solidifies the relationship between spouses and brings children into being. Others claim that human sexuality is a private recreational good, with neither moral nor social significance.

The claim rests on the assumption that things have predetermined purposes which man must not contravene. It also presupposes the importance of moral and social 'significance,' whatever that wavering shadow of speech is meant to convey. Whether sexuality as a biological phenomenon is a 'natural engine of sociability' or not, humans are infinitely capable of transcending their biology and as sentient beings with every manner of desire, dream, and intellectual capacity deserve the right to live privately and without subjection to social mores. There's too much of the authoritarian in Morse's subtext which belies her libertarian claims.

Throughout she flashes her distaste at the modern culture of promiscuity, implicitly hearkening back to the good old days, a fallacy engaged in since Hesiod's races of the metals. Like many academics she includes a long quote by a recognizable name, here Rousseau, only to apply it (cleverly, she thinks) to some unconnected modern foible:

Rousseau could be describing the modern hook-up culture, down to and including the reluctance of hook-up partners to even talk to each other.

By now I'm bored with her and find all of her unsupported claims, fanciful examples ('A man and a woman have a child. ...'), and constant reference to her position and the sole opposing view (binary oppositions are an insult to intelligent people) annoying. So what's the crux of her biscuit?

Having constructed as the only alternative to her own position a straw man ('the deconstruction of marriage into a series of temporary couplings with unspecified numbers and genders of people' using 'the language of choice and individual rights') she deftly delivers the Coup de Jarnac:

It is simply not possible to have a minimum government in a society with no social or legal norms about family structure, sexual behavior, and childrearing. The state will have to provide support for people with loose or nonexistent ties to their families. The state will have to sanction truly destructive behavior, as always. But destructive behavior will be more common because the culture of impartiality destroys the informal system of enforcing social norms.

That's it? All in all a weak argument in an unnecessarily lengthy exercise in sophistic dissimulation.

So why is she so adamant about the sanctity of the family, and why does she hide it behind false economic analogies?

Surely it's her Catholic faith.