The currently controversial question of gay “marriage” is the reductio ad absurdum of the liberal conception of marriage—marriage, as Kant put it, as a “contract for the mutual exercise of the genitalia.” But the bundle of legal “benefits” (and encumbrances) to which gay couples say they seek access was never a recognition of “love.” Rather, these features of traditional marriage were accommodations to the “facts of life”—the fact that it is from the union of one particular man and one particular woman that a new life arises, together with a recognition that children are best reared to responsible adulthood in the setting of a stable, well-capitalized, independent household with a mother and a father. Marriage is naturally about children.
(Mark C. Henrie, "Understanding Traditionalist Conservatism," chap. 1 in Varieties of Conservatism in America, ed. Peter Berkowitz [Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2004], 3-30, at 22 [italics in original])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 