s: just as all players are not equally valuable to a team, all relationships are not equally valuable to a society. Evidence from 5,000 years of human history, the self-evident complimentary design of the male and female bodies, and the documented beneficial results of traditional marriage to individuals and our society prove that the most valuable sexual relationship to any civilization is the union of a man and a woman in the bonds of matrimony. If we allow any other sexual relationship to have the same legal status as the heterosexual relationship in traditional marriage, we will degrade marriage itself (just like we degrade the MVP award by giving it to everyone). If we degrade marriage, heterosexual couples will be less inclined to participate, which will further weaken our civilization.

How Would Homosexual Marriage Hurt Children?

If government endorses the idea that marriage is just a legal contract between consenting adults of any gender, regardless of procreative realities, then marriage will no longer be seen as a prerequisite for bearing and raising children. Marriage will be seen as nothing more than coupling. In fact, that’s exactly how Sullivan sees marriage now. He writes, “Coupling — not procreation — is what civil marriage now is.”19

If Sullivan’s view of marriage prevails — as it will if homosexual marriage is legalized — many more couples in our society will forgo traditional marriage and have more children out of wedlock. That will hurt children because illegitimate parents (there’s no such thing as illegitimate children) often never form a family, and those parents who simply live together break up at a rate two to three times that of married parents. When illegitimacy rises, not only do children suffer, but the rest of us are forced to pay high social costs to deal with the problems that result from it, including increases in the number of neglected and troubled children, as well as in crime, poverty, and social spending.

Are these just the hysterical warnings of an alarmist? No. We can look at the results in Norway, a country that has had homosexual marriage (without legal sanction) for about a decade. In Nordland, the most liberal county of Norway, where they fly gay “rainbow” flags over their churches, out-of-wedlock births have soared. In Nordland, more than 80 percent of women giving birth for the first time do so out of wedlock and nearly 70 percent of all children are born out of wedlock! Across the entire country of Norway, the out-of-wedlock birth rate rose from 39 percent in 1990 to 50 percent in 2000.20

Social anthropologis