What is marriage?

As this post at the oddly named Rogue Slayer Law Student Movie Fan illustrates, the anti-gay marriage forces lose the logical argument for the simple reason that their definition of marriage is faulty—not just outdated, but genuinely flawed. For them, marriage is a factory for making little humans. It’s genetics. It’s breeding. When Alan Keyes analogizes same-sex marriage to space travel, he’s making the point that same-sex marriage is simply impossible as a matter of fact: just as a person is “not physically equipped to fly to the moon,” so homosexuals are not “physically equipped” for marriage, because for opponents of gay marriage, physical equipment, not spiritual equipment, is what is important. Marriage is a physical relationship to them—not a spiritual connection, not an emotional connection, not an intellectual partnership, but a physical relationship.

This fact tears the masquerade of conservatives, who claim to be great defenders of spirituality and the so-called “higher” things. When it comes to abortion, they say that a single-celled organism with human DNA but without a mind has rights, because it contains human DNA—the mind is irrelevant. It’s all about the “physical equipment.” When it comes to marriage, they say two women cannot get married to each other, no matter how long and how fully they have supported each other, because the spiritual or emotional connection is irrelevant. It’s all about the “physical equipment.” As Ayn Rand said,

Sex is a physical capacity, but its exercise is determined by man’s mind—by his choice of values, held consciously or subconsciously. To a rational man [or woman], sex is an expression of self-esteem—a celebration of himself and of existence…. The capacity to procreate is merely a potential which man is not obligated to actualize…. Nature endows man with a variety of potentials—and it is his mind that must decide which capacities he chooses to exercise, according to his own hierarchy of rational goals and values…. [T]he mere fact that man has the capacity to procreate, does not mean that it is his duty to commit spiritual suicide by making procreation his primary goal and turning himself into a stud-farm animal. It is only animals that have to adapt themselves to their physical background and to the biological functions of their bodies. Man adapts his physical background and the use of his biological faculties to himself—to his own needs and values. That is his distinction from all other living species…. In terms of reality, nothing could be more materialistic than an existence devoted to feeding the whole world and procreating to the limit of one’s capacity. But when [conservatives] say “materialist” they mean pertaining to man’s mind and to this earth; by “spiritual,” they mean whatever is anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life, and, above all, anti-possibility of human happiness on earth.

Of Living Death, The Objectivist, October, 1968 at 530-31, 547.