A New Birth of Marriage

The Declaration is not a self-interpreting document, and liberalism is not a self-sufficient creed. The Declaration’s principles do not exist in a vacuum. It does little good to speak the nouns “liberty” and “equality” without the corresponding adjectives and direct objects that give meaning to this founding document. Regarding marriage, the unique contribution of the American Founding of marriage was seeing marital unity, parental responsibilities and communal duties regarding marriage and child rearing in a way that was consistent with equality and liberty. The logic of consent alone does little to understand the family’s accidental yet transcendent nature. Wives may choose husbands, but parents do not choose children and children do not choose parents. No one individual chooses the life a couple will share together.

No individual who loves chooses the life he lives. Yet, if family means anything, all of these individuals are morally bound to each other, and these bonds restrict individual autonomy. This bondage secures meaningful private and public goods. Non-liberal principles such as Courageous Love and marital unity give consent meaning in marital and familial relationships. Courageous Love is always chosen, but it differs from Liberationist Love in confining future choices according to love’s bondage. Courageous Love is prerequisite to marital unity, because it provides spouses and children the assurance necessary to build a life together.

The Founders’ vision of marriage and family flow from Courageous Love more than mere consent or Liberationist Love because they knew that trying to build a republican society on Liberationist Love was like building a house on quicksand. Marriage reveals, perhaps more than any other phenomenon, the need for liberalism to be complemented and reinforced with non-liberal goods such as education, gratitude, familial duty, mutual dependence and transcendent love — the very goods Courageous Love honors and marital unity secures. The founders of American marriage were committed to the politics of equality, but they also knew that one principle — even equality or liberty — could never capture the complexity and richness of the human experience. The non-liberal goods of Courageous Love and marital unity are necessary to human flourishing and the maintenance of republican liberty because they reinforce the relational goods and responsibilities that Liberationist Love’s unreliable consent cannot.