What Is Marriage?

Man and Woman: A Defense

By: Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, Robert George

Narrated by: Claton Butcher

Length: 4 hrs

Publisher's Summary

Until very recently, no society had seen marriage as anything other than a conjugal partnership: a male-female union. What Is Marriage? identifies and defends the reasons for this historic consensus and shows why redefining civil marriage as something other than the conjugal union of husband and wife is a mistake. 

Originally published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, this book’s core argument quickly became the year’s most widely read essay on the most prominent scholarly network in the social sciences. Since then, it has been cited and debated by scholars and activists throughout the world as the most formidable defense of the tradition ever written. Now revamped, expanded, and vastly enhanced, What Is Marriage? stands poised to meet its moment as few books of this generation have. 

Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George offer a devastating critique of the idea that equality requires redefining marriage. They show why both sides must first answer the question of what marriage really is. They defend the principle that marriage, as a comprehensive union of mind and body ordered to family life, unites a man and a woman as husband and wife, and they document the social value of applying this principle in law. 

Most compellingly, they show that those who embrace same-sex civil marriage leave no firm ground - none - for not recognizing every relationship describable in polite English, including polyamorous sexual unions, and that enshrining their view would further erode the norms of marriage, and hence the common good. 

Finally, What Is Marriage? decisively answers common objections: that the historic view is rooted in bigotry, like laws forbidding interracial marriage; that it is callous to people’s needs; that it can’t show the harm of recognizing same-sex couplings or the point of recognizing infertile ones; and that it treats a mere “social construct” as if it were natural or an unreasoned religious view as if it were rational.

©2020 Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George (P)2020 Black Hills Audiobooks LLC

Excellent analysis.

Excellent analysis of marriage, the union of a man and a woman. The question "what is marriage, and why is it a societal good, distinct from other arrangements" was fully explored and answered.

Narrator has a pleasant voice too.

Well thought out, but dull

Well, I agree in principle with most of the arguments made by the authors of this book, I have to lament that they chose such a dull way of presenting their material.

The authors seem to have done a fairly good job of constructing a philosophical argument in favor of confining marriage to one man and one woman, but they’ve largely left out any of the warmth and emotional argumentation that would make a book like this pack a real cultural punch.

This book ends up being a sort of uncomfortable middle ground between the dry but thoroughly well argued, philosophical tome that I think they wanted to write, and the shorter, punchier, popular-apologetics-type book that I think they actually attempted to write. It’s not a bad book, but it’s a book that doesn’t really succeed in fully embodying either of those approaches.

My last complaint is with the narration (I bought the audiobook version). The narrator has a fairly dull, emotionless voice in this audiobook. This, coupled with the dull, emotionless nature of the material that he’s reading, makes for a bit of a tedious listen.

Because of the paucity of well thought out discussions around this topic in our current cultural climate, I still recommend people interested in the case for traditional marriage give this book a shot. Just don’t expect it to be a thrilling read.

Non religious appeal to the preservation of the definition of marriage

Brilliant book that introduces thought to the idea the marriage is not a distinctly religious institution and therefore can have a defense outside of religious claims. It is not homophobic or bigoted in nature and merely serves to explain the reasoning behind society and culture’s benefit from maintaining the man and woman marriage construct. It is a defense of the definition of marriage, not on what two (or more) consenting adults do amongst themselves.