It should not be surprising that a judicially imposed dilution of the meaning of marriage has contributed to a cultural deterioration of marriage as an institution.

Ten years ago last Thursday, the Supreme Court, in its 5–4 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, legalized gay marriage. Though the campaign for gay marriage was to a considerable extent elite-driven, it owed at least some of its popular success to arguments, such as those advanced by Andrew Sullivan starting in 1989, that gay marriage could be a bourgeois, even a small-c conservative thing.

I made the case over the weekend, however, that there was a germ of radicalism even in such arguments. Over the past ten years, we have seen the result, most notably in the suspiciously immediate rise of transgenderism.

In the Public Discourse, Matthew Franck argues along similar lines. He also focuses on something I only touched on in my article: the effect of gay marriage on marriage as an institution. In his 1989 article, Sullivan claimed:

The argument that gay marriage would subtly undermine the unique legitimacy of straight marriage is based upon a fallacy. For heterosexuals, straight marriage would remain the most significant — and only legal — social bond. Gay marriage could only delegitimize straight marriage if it were a real alternative to it, and this is clearly not true.

Franck, however, observes the damage that marriage as an institution has endured over the past decade. He makes a persuasive case that it is downstream of the Obergefell decision:

. . . all this damage — legal, cultural, personal — is inseparable from the Supreme Court’s malpractice in Obergefell. It is not surprising that same-sex marriage has been largely a cultural failure, as both its critics and its advocates have recently noted. The Court did not “open” or “expand” marriage ten years ago; it redefined and deconstructed it. Marriage is in a state of crisis in the West, of which our declining birthrates are only the most obvious marker. In vitro fertilization, gamete sales, surrogacy, de facto baby shopping, genetic screening (and destruction) of embryos, polyamory — all of these harbingers of Huxley’s brave new world are connected to the Obergefell project.

This is not a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, or a fallacy of any kind. Rather, it helps prove the reality of the slippery slope that gay marriage advocates assured us was not real. Marriage once had a specific meaning. Other trends have played a role in the degradation of that meaning as well: the rise of cohabitation and divorce, for example. Yet it should not be surprising that a judicially imposed dilution of that meaning has contributed to a cultural deterioration of marriage as an institution.