The question of homosexual marriage presents the American people with an inescapable moral challenge. The words homosexual and marriage are inherently contradictory. The very fact that these terms are in public conflict demonstrates the radical character of the social revolutionaries that now demand the legalization of homosexual marriage.

For at least the last one hundred years, America has experienced an unprecedented season of social transformation. Now, this transformation has been extended to experimentation with the most basic institutions and cherished principles of our common life. A conversation about "homosexual marriage" is only possible if the concept of marriage is completely redefined and severed from its historic roots and organic meaning.

Civilization requires the regulation of human sexuality and relationships. No society--ancient or modern--has survived by advocating a laissez faire approach to sex and sexual relationships.  Every society, no matter how liberal, sanctions some sexual behaviors and proscribes others.  Every society establishes some form of sexual norm.

Pitirim Sorokin, the founder of sociology at Harvard University, pointed to the regulation of sexuality as the essential first mark of civilization. According to Sorokin, civilization is possible only when marriage is normative and sexual conduct is censured outside of the marital relationship. Furthermore, Sorokin traced the rise and fall of civilizations and concluded that the weakening of marriage was a first sign of civilizational collapse.

We should note that Sorokin made these arguments long before anything like homosexual marriage had been openly discussed. Sorokin's insight was the realization that civilization requires men to take responsibility for their offspring. This was possible, he was convinced, only when marriage was held to be the unconditional expectation for sexual activity and procreation. Once individuals--especially males--are freed for sexual behavior outside of marriage, civilizational collapse becomes an inevitability. The weakening of marriage--even on heterosexual terms--has already brought a harvest of disaster to mothers and children abandoned in the name of sexual liberation.

The regulation of sexuality is thus a primary responsibility of any civilization. In their review of Western civilization, Will and Ariel Durant noted that sex is "a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints." The primary restraint has always been the institution of marriage itself--an institution that is inescapably heterosexual and based in the monogamous union of a man and a woman as husband and wife. In postmodern America, the fires of sex are increasingly unbanked and uncooled.

In a very real sense, marriage becomes the civilizational DNA of our social genetic structure. Beyond this, marriage serves as the basic molecular structure for human social organization. Though the family is extended through children and other bonds of kinship, the basic "molecule" of human society is marriage. This molecular reality implies that the structure cannot be changed without destroying the molecule--and the organizm--itself.