Commentary The United States is engaged in a prolonged struggle over the meaning of marriage, and the American Founders’ conception of marriage remains something formidable to reckon with in this contest. The centrality of the Founders’ thinking was apparent in the 2015 Supreme Court same-sex marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges, in which each side argued that justice and history supported its cause. Notable historians filed a brief arguing that “voluntary consent between the couple” was and always had been the only meaningful feature of American marriage. On the other side, advocates of man-woman marriage argued that procreation and childrearing were vital to the institutional and historical understanding of marriage because they were inherently linked to what the Founders understood to be marriage’s beating heart—the concept of enduring marital unity. These advocates were tapping into a long and venerable history that recognized marital unity as American marriage’s animating principle. The language of marital unity is ubiquitous …
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