The argument against same-sex “marriage” isn’t really about marriage; it’s about children – right? Well, yes and no. Actually, it’s primarily, or at least first, about the human body or bodies, before it is about either of those realities. The body, as Blessed Pope John Paul II has written, is the “sacrament” or “icon” of the person, male and female, revealing the deepest essence of who we are. Thus, what we do with our body matters on many levels – moral, spiritual, emotional, physical – especially when those bodies unite in a sexual way with other body-persons.

Now, when a man/husband and woman/wife engage in the marital act and thus physically unite their bodies as one flesh, male and female, their bodies “sacramentalize” or “sign” both union and procreation, that is, they symbolize both their “covenanting” each other in the sacrament of matrimony and their power to bring forth new human life (and if they are fertile and do not use contraception, they may, with God’s help, actually bring such life into being). That is what their bodies “say” objectively – even apart from their intentions or feelings, whatever they may be – when they unite in the marital act. And their bodies can, in fact, “say” that, precisely because the body is an intrinsic and integral aspect, rather than merely an instrumental aspect, of their personhood as male and female body-persons.

But the bodies of two men (or two women) are, when joined together in sodomitical acts, incapable of “sacramentalizing” such a good as procreation (even if they wish they could). It is simply impossible for them. Their bodies – male with male or female with female – are, although created good by God, essentially incapable of “saying” this through such a sodomitcal union. Or, more precisely, their bodily unions are unable to “say” this. They lack the biological (but not solely biological) male-female complementarity necessary for the “language of the body” to “speak” what it is supposed to “say.”

To put all this another way, drawing once again from John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body,” their bodies lack, and naturally so, the “spousal” or “nuptial” meaning of the body. This is the body-person’s capacity for being a “gift” to a member of the opposite sex in marriage, that is, his or her capacity to be able to give his or her self fully in love to one’s husband or wife, as well as to receive that love in turn. This conjugal love, however, is no disembodied love, but includes the personal good of the body and its fertility (or radical capacity for fertility, in the case of couples who struggle with infertility). Married love is a fecund kind of love, in addition to it being a “two-in-one flesh” kind of love (cf. Mt 19: 5-6; Gn 2:24; 1 Cor 6:16; Eph 5:31).

So, the argument against gay “marriage” isn’t just that “homosexuals are unable to have biological children of their own,” that is, to procreate (unless, of course, they use in vitro fertilization; but even then, sperm and/or ovum donors are needed in a technical act of reproduction). No, even more so, the uniting of their bodies cannot, by nature, be a true uniting of bodies in marriage. They cannot – and this is intrinsically so – “speak” the language of the goods of “life and love” in a union whose bodies (are meant to) express those very goods or blessings spoken of in the book of Genesis (Those goods constitute marriage, as it were). And thus, there can be no true “marriage” for them; for a marital union is, by nature and definition, one oriented and open to those fundamental goods of human persons.

Same-sex sexual acts are obviously inherently closed to the good of procreation (and to the good of authentic love, as well). And, importantly, because we can show that using contraception is always morally wrong because it involves the choice to impede new human life from-coming-to-be, we can also say therefore that redefining marriage is always morally wrong: For even before any possible sexual act takes place, sexual unions between persons of the same sex are already intrinsically closed to handing on new human life.

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Gay “marriage” is, then, in a very real sense, a form of union that is itself “contracepted” or “sterilized,” not so much in the moral sense, but by nature – even though gays are of course, as noted above, incapable of procreating children of their own apart from modern reproductive technologies. Without denying the possibility of genuine friendship and affection between same-sex partners, the essence or meaning of sexual unions between persons of the same sex is sterility. Their love cannot be conjugal or marital love. Therefore marriage should not be redefined to include the legalization of same-sex unions.

There is no real state interest in a union that is not simply childless, but one that has no natural and intrinsic connection to children, to the formation of a family – at all. Unlike the “comprehensive” good that is heterosexual marriage, same-sex unions are inherently closed to every basic good that intrinsically comprises the multivalent “good of marriage.” This is another way of saying that same-sex couples may be partners, but they can never be spouses.

Mark S. Latkovic, S.T.D. is a Professor of Moral Theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary (Detroit, MI), where he has taught for over 23 years. He is co-editor of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition: Contemporary Perspectives (The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), as well as author of What’s a Person to Do? Everyday Decisions that Matter (Our Sunday Visitor, 2013) and numerous articles in scholarly and popular journals.

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