God. Real. Right.

With the highest court in California ruling that gay marriages must be allowed comes a realization that many people do not understand what makes marriage so ideal an institution. If the requirement that marriage be between man and woman is erased in this culture, both of the most significant characteristics of marriage will have been all but lost.
The first, though not the point of this post, is worth mentioning. That is, the richest, most personal, most intimate experience between human beings can only be that if it includes complete vulnerability and trust. It is the moment of honest revelation. But the complete vulnerability and trust required is only possible in a relationship of unconditional commitment. That is to say, the fact that marriage is with only one person, and with that person for a lifetime, is what makes it possible for physical intimacy to have its full meaning. That meaning, knowing one person in this world completely and honestly, is substantially missing in this culture’s misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the goal of sex. (By the way, the culture’s obsession with trysts, online relationships, and voyeurism is predictably driven by the desperate need for–lack of–that complete transparency.)
But the second essential characteristic of marriage all but lost in this society is the point of this post. The marriage relationship is not a reinforcement of the personality of one of the participants. That is, God did not create Adam and then add to him a double to make his presence even more masculine. God created Adam, and then created another person complementary to Adam’s characteristics, Eve. The two things that are obvious about Eve are the two things which control the second point here. That is, Eve is created to be fundamentally different from Adam. She is “neged” (or “meet” in the KJV), a counterpart or opposite to him. At the same time she is morally (or in terms of worth) equivalent to him, parallel. If Adam had needed someone with characteristics and purposes identical to his, then the future of humanity’s regard for each others’ moral worth would have been wrapped up in such an identity. That is, if everyone existing at the moral level of humanity were male, then obviously only males would be regarded with that moral worth. But such is not the case. God brought to Adam a person fundamentally different in one essential way, gender. But by making that person from Adam’s own flesh and provoking Adam’s response, “this is certainly bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” God made it imperative that humans appreciate each others’ value not because they are male or female, but because they are human. The difference is fundamentally important to the cause of maintaining moral worth. It is equally important in making the other attribute of marriage real. A man married to a woman appreciates not only a transparent, vulnerable relationship with a person of equal worth (the first point, above), but also enjoys that relationship with a person whose essential nature is different from his own in a fundamental way, gender. The practical and somewhat trivial consequence of that relationship is the reason men and women ought to be grateful rather than frustrated when their spouse organizes things differently, or thinks differently, or appreciates things differently. As one counselor said to an aggravated husband: “The best thing about your wife is that she’s not like you!” But the deep and unavoidable weight of that implication is that a relationship between “likes” rather than “opposites” cannot carry with it the moral appreciation intended by God from the creation. It compromises the depth of the appreciation of an “other” rather than a “same”, and it thereby undermines any extension from that highest relationship outward to the equivalent worth of all human beings–regardless of real differences.
So, in reality, the statement “we should appreciate our differences” implies not what the California Supreme Court has suggested, but rather the opposite. The only way to appreciate difference, to regard all human beings as of equal moral worth, is to maintain the one difference that really matters, the difference realized when one woman knows she needs a relationship with one man, for life.
(Thanks to the conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton for a book of his I read about ten years ago which established and provoked these ideas.)