These essays examine marriage and the family and challenge the right of men to dominate women.

This book addresses fundamental questions about marriage in moral and political philosophy. It examines promise, commitment, care, and contract to argue that marriage is not morally transformative. It argues that marriage discriminates against other forms of caring relationships and that, legally, restrictions on entry should be minimized.

Informal customs have become the norm for most young adults in matters of sexual intimacy. Unfortunately, the sexual revolution has not proven to be as beneficial to women as was hoped, and society offers young men little preparation for future roles as husbands and fathers. In this book, Father Piderit argues that a natural law approach to morality provides a grounded pathway toward marriage, and shows why these fairly traditional practices help young people find a partner whom they can realistically promise to love until death do them part. Offering theory but focusing on practice, this book helps young adults understand why sexual intimacy should be reserved for marriage. The first two sections develop the natural law basis for behavior. Father Piderit points out that natural law relies primarily on reason, not religion, and his explanation provides a way to understand a Christian approach to morality as grounded in nature. The final third of the book explores what religious practice and membership in a Christian denomination adds to the natural law approach. Father Piderit uses clear, practical examples to show that positive goals are what motivate human beings. By breaking down the potentially abstract concept of morality into a set of intuitive practices guided by natural law, Father Piderit provides young people and students with the tools to create a positive courtship and, ultimately, a solid marriage based on strong, shared values and mutual respect.

The thesis of this book is that God intends that sexual intercourse should be at least implicitly a renewal of the marriage covenant. From this it follows that the marriage covenant provides the criterion to evaluate the morality of every sexual act. Thus the title, Sex and the Marriage Covenant, is an appropriate description of the bookಙs contents. Marriage comes into being by a couple unreservedly entering God's covenant of marriage; contraceptive intercourse contradicts the very essence of the marriage covenant. From these considerations, Kippley developed the covenant theology of sexuality described in this book.

Does sexual difference matter for marriage? Are there good theological reasons why the two main characters in a marriage should be a male and a female, or is marriage a more flexible covenant, which any two people can keep? Creation and Covenant analyzes latent but under-examined beliefs about sexual difference in the theology about marriage which has been dominant for centuries in the Christian west. The book opens by studying patristic theologies of marriage, which rested on mostly implicit and often incompatible beliefs about sexual difference. However, Roberts argues that Augustine developed a coherent theology of sexual difference, according it a shifting significance from creation to eschaton. Roberts traces how Augustine's theology influenced and was developed by subsequent theologians, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Luther, Barth, and John Paul II. Finally, Roberts engages today's debates about gay marriage. Before becoming an academic, Dr. Roberts was a journalist. On behalf of PBS television, he covered both the Lambeth Conference in England and the World Council of Churches in Zimbabwe. During those years, he was disappointed by both the liberal and conservative arguments on homosexuality. Left-wingers seemed more interested in privacy, autonomy, and experience than in theology, and right-wingers seemed to have lots of prohibitions but little good news. In the final chapters, this book tries to do better, inviting liberals to improve the standard of their arguments, and explaining what is beautiful and persuasive about the traditional case.

The diverse expert contributors to this volume from the fields of politics and law use moral argumentation with respect to same-sex marriage, gay rights in general, and California's Prop 8. The arguments are advanced in terms of the nation's foundational political and legal principles, extending ethical argumentation to important contemporary public policy areas such as marriage, the separation of church and state, and the rearing of children. Several chapters also contest the perceived if not actual establishment in the law and public policy of heterosexist and religious bias that continues to work against full and meaningful inclusion of sexual minorities. This bias is ironically and improperly couched in the language of American political and religious values, and it misunderstands the nation's core principles, or willfully miscasts them as inapplicable to many Americans and their families. Nonetheless, this bias is pervasive in the nation's political discourse, working to deny an important right and the recognition of equality to many citizens. The main contribution ofMoral Argument, Religion, and Same-Sex Marriage is in its direct engagement with the political and legal arguments of the gay community's critics on their own moral and ethical terms. Along the way, important concepts in public discourse_such as governmental neutrality, the right to marry, and religious freedom_are presented and cast in the light of liberal-democratic theory.