Sherif Girgis Quotes & Sayings

even leading revisionists now argue that if sexual complementarity is optional, so are permanence and exclusivity. This is not because the slope from same-sex unions to expressly temporary7 and polyamorous ones is slippery, but because most revisionist arguments level the ground between them: If marriage is primarily about emotional union, why privilege two-person unions, or permanently committed ones? What is it about emotional union, valuable as it can be, that requires these limits? — Sherif Girgis

ordinary friendships simply do not affect the common good in structured ways that could justify legal regulation. — Sherif Girgis

Thus, again, marriage is comprehensive in some basic ways, not in every sense. But the same holds of most revisionists' master principle: a spouse cannot be your "number one partner" in every activity, or your "soul-mate" in every domain. — Sherif Girgis

As we deprive marriage policy of definite shape, we deprive it of public purpose. — Sherif Girgis

Judith Stacey - a prominent New York University professor who is in no way regarded as a fringe figure, in testifying before Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act - expressed hope that the revisionist view's triumph would give marriage "varied, creative, and adaptive contours . . . [leading some to] question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek . . . small group marriages."44 In their statement "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage," more than three hundred "LGBT and allied" scholars and advocates - including prominent Ivy League professors - call for legally recognizing sexual relationships involving more than two partners.45 University of Calgary Professor Elizabeth Brake thinks that justice requires us to use legal recognition to "denormalize[] heterosexual monogamy as a way of life" and correct for "past discrimination against homosexuals, bisexuals, polygamists, and care networks."46 — Sherif Girgis

Finally, promoting conjugal marriage need not and should not involve prohibiting any consensual relationship. For all these reasons, libertarians should favor the regulation of marriage-which is, again, practically inevitable anyway. — Sherif Girgis

The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary - culturally and biologically - for the optimal development of a human being."12 In a summary of the relevant science, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox finds much the same: Let me now conclude our review of the social scientific literature on sex and parenting by spelling out what should be obvious to all. The best psychological, sociological, and biological research to date now suggests that - on average - men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise, that children benefit from having parents with distinct parenting styles, and that family breakdown poses a serious threat to children and to the societies in which they live.13 — Sherif Girgis

If marriage is centrally an emotional union, rather than one inherently ordered to family life, it becomes much harder to show why the state should concern itself with marriage any more than with friendship. Why involve the state in what amounts to the legal regulation of tenderness? — Sherif Girgis

Enacting same-sex civil marriage would therefore not be an expansion of the institution of marriage, but a redefinition. Finishing what policies like "no-fault" divorce began, and thus entrenching them, it would finally replace the conjugal view with the revisionist view, elevating the latter to the dignity of legal principle. In so doing, it would multiply the marriage revolution's moral and cultural spoils, and make them harder than ever to recover. Or so we shall argue. — Sherif Girgis

As the family weakens, our welfare and correctional bureaucracies grow. — Sherif Girgis