It Is Time to Legalize and Accept Same-Sex Marriage

In light of recent arguments in front on the Supreme Court, and their impending ruling (expected any day) on what marriage is—or more precisely, who can get married—I feel compelled as an expert on relationships and families to weigh in on this issue.

As any family scholar or historian will tell you, the idea that the Ozzie and Harriet prototype of marriage as being between one man and one woman is somehow universal throughout history is misguided. This is a common misconception which apparently even Supreme Court justices fall prey to, as my colleague Christine Adams pointed out in a recent piece in the Baltimore Sun. In fact, the generally accepted definition of marriage has been debated, contested, and evolving for centuries. Even before the current wave of legal and moral arguments, and shifts in public opinion, scholars in the areas of anthropology, sociology, and family studies debated the definition of marriage for over half a century, and have still not been able to come up with a clear definition that everyone accepts. As Stephanie Coontz wrote a decade ago in her book titled Marriage: A History—How Love Conquered Marriage, “almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before.”

Source: "Twoflorencemenkiss" by Bartolomeo Cesi - [1]. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

So, if the “traditional” notions of marriage aren’t as universal as many assume, and things like same-sex marriage aren’t necessarily that new or novel, what is the current state of marriage?

Well, contrary to what some conservative lobbying groups like the Family Research Council (which, ironically, ignores much of the research on this issue) might tell you, marriage is not currently in crisis. It is more accurate to say that marriage is evolving, like it has been for centuries. As this evolution continues, one distinct trend has emerged–love. For most of history, marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was about power, politics, economics, and social order. Those things are still somewhat true, but in the eighteenth century love became the fundamental reason for marriage, and now the vast majority of marriages are formed by the two individuals involved on the basis of love.

If modern marriage is fundamentally based on love, then why shouldn’t each individual be free to marry the individual that they love? Surely there is room in the notion of love-based marriage for same-sex couples, and surely the time has come for us to legalize and accept same-sex marriage.

Research is certainly on the side of acceptance. The vast majority of relationship research shows that same-sex couples function much like heterosexual couples. The late Lawrence Kurdek, who did extensive research on heterosexual and homosexual couples, concluded in his 2004 article in the Journal of Marriage and Family that “the processes that regulate relationship functioning generalize across gay, lesbian, and heterosexual couples.” In fact, the vast majority of relationship researchers have found that there aren’t significant differences between opposite-sex and same-sex couples, and that the detrimental effects of being in a same-sex relationship (if any) are likely the result of institutional barriers and social stigma—effects that would be eliminated if we legalized and accepted same-sex marriage. Moreover, although the link between marriage and parenthood is weakening for all relationship types—according to the CDC, over 40 percent of births in the U.S. are to unmarried women—research almost universally supports the notion that same-sex couples are effective parents. In fact, much like the research on relationships, the vast majority of research on parenting and child-rearing has identified no real differences between children of gay and straight parents. If anything, children of same-sex parents grow up feeling greatly wanted and loved—and that is one of the strongest predictors of effective parenting.

So… researchers, the majority of the American public, and even advertisers (see Tylenol’s recent add on #HowWeFamily) are calling for acceptance—isn’t it time the Supreme Court and our legal system followed suit?