What is marriage?

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 in 2012, this book’s core argument quickly became the year’s most widely read essay on the most prominent scholarly network in the social sciences.