What is the Central Purpose of Marriage?

In pondering the central purpose of marriage I wondered, is there a difference between what marriage is useful for and why people get married. Marriage is fundamentally a teambuilding exercise for human animals, and it has taken various forms throughout history because the shared definition of marriage is allowed to change. Universal Sexual Rights were adopted at the 14th World Congress of Sexology in 1999, and subsequently by the World Health Organization ( Conference Report of the Fourteenth World Congress of Sexology 23-27 August 1999, Hong Kong). These include, but are not limited to, the sexual rights to freedom, autonomy, privacy, equity, and to associate freely. They offer a blueprint for the expansion of justice.

Rausch argues that marriage is the creation of a home, and “It is a place where someone waits for you” (19) He gets to the heart of marriage more universally and justifiably than Stanton and Maier, however might be too invested in the utility of marriage at the expense of teleological flexibility as we will see. Rowan Williams makes in interesting argument for what emotional intimacy is for. And before getting too much into what marriage is, I want to show what marriage is not, namely that it is exclusively between men and women.

Thankfully, marriage has become more egalitarian and inclusive in recent centuries. And same-sex marriage is a recent incarnation of a liberation movement, just like the Civil Rights movement. Authors like Stanton and Maier do not show the supposed harm of same-sex marriage. Their view is over-simplified and lacks imagination and evidence. They depend heavily on God and frankly, God requires more philosophical explanation than he/she/it provides.

To begin with, Stanton and Maier’s opinion in Marriage On Trial promotes and relies on ignorance. From the beginning, in responding to the question “What’s wrong with same-sex marriage?” they make the unsupported claim that same-sex relationships are “not part of the tradition of any human culture” (22). The American Anthropological Society disagrees, and they state,

“The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.”(Statement on Marriage and the Family from the American Anthropological Association, Marriage.)