During his testimony, Mr. [David] Blankenhorn noted that granting gay men and women the right to marry would be a gesture quintessentially in the American spirit of equality. Nevertheless, it was a gesture from which he urged the court to demur for the simple reason that two men or two women could not conceive a child together, and that “a child needs a mother and a father.”
To be fair to Mr. Blankenhorn, though he is no expert on same-sex unions, there is a great deal of social-science evidence connecting marriage and the active engagement of two biological parents with child well-being. And there is simply no other way to view the age-old, universal institution of marriage than as rooted in the biological family.
Marriage, like all cultural institutions, evolves; and it may look very different in different cultures. But the institution’s common denominator across time and cultures has been its dedication to the offices of reproduction. The great 20th century cultural anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky stated that while marriage is as old as human life, it has never been primarily a romantic, or even an economic, bond. It has been principally an arrangement for bearing children.