Imagine it was your task to write a book entitled, Why Sticking a Fork in Your Eye is a Very Bad Idea. You aren’t an ophthalmologist, or a silversmith. You have passed through kitchens all your life without ever being tempted. But millions of your fellow citizens are deeply confused on the issue. Social and corporate elites have overwhelmingly weighed in on the side of the fork-stickers. A million Facebook profiles now bear the fork-stickers’ logo: a smiling, one-eyed pirate. The Supreme Court has weighed in with a poorly reasoned, 5-4 decision, Cutco v. Texas, that backs the practice of fork-sticking, and threatens grave legal penalties to those who disagree. Across the U.S., opticians who oppose this practice for reasons of conscience are being sued and run out of business. Eye surgeons fear that they will be next.

So it’s your task to carefully compile all the medical, aesthetic, historical and practical reasons why the “fork-sticker” lobby is wrong, lay them out patiently and without exasperation, in a reasoned appeal to one-eyed and two-eyed Americans alike to please, please reconsider. That must have been how Ryan Anderson felt when he took on the project of writing Truth Overruled, his tightly-argued and highly useful new book on the legal, moral, and social implications of same-sex “marriage.” We are very glad he shouldered this cross, and recommend his new book to all.

Anderson lays out soberly all the radical, counter-intuitive and just-plain-crazy implications of the Supreme Court decision in June, Obergefell v. Hodges, that overturned all state laws predicated on the natural, timeless structure of marriage as one man and one woman, hopefully till death:

• Marriage is not about protecting children and helping to form future free citizens. It exists to cater to the fleeting emotional needs of adults.
• The state recognizes marriages in order to validate the “dignity” of citizens — that is, to boost their self-esteem.
• Men and women are exactly the same, and therefore completely interchangeable as parents.
• Children do not need or deserve continuity of care from their biological parents. Any adult present will do.
• The U.S. Constitution has no permanent, substantive meaning. It is instead a means by which social and legal elites can override democratic majorities whenever they feel that the time is ripe to impose new philosophical premises on the populace.
• The free exercise of religion is no more extensive than simple free speech, and can be restricted when a religious group’s views diverge from the Court’s majority view of what the Constitution means at the moment.
• The connection between sexual activity and human reproduction is simply accidental, a quirk of biology that has no implications for morality, law or society.
• Those who deny any of these points are morally equivalent to white racists, and will be treated by the government with no greater deference.

Anderson is not alone in recognizing the sheer radicalism of Obergefell v. Hodges; indeed, four justices of the Court, including its Chief Justice, John Roberts, issued a stinging dissent that raises most of the objections which Anderson coolly unpacks in the course of his book. Advocates of same-sex marriage were quick to brush such arguments aside, and cast their opponents as isolated, irrational extremists, motivated only by fideistic reliance on ancient religious texts. Anderson makes it clear that this tactic is fundamentally dishonest, expanding on the dissenters’ points and fleshing each of them out with reference to history, biology, social science — and yes, even religion.

Anderson rightly avoids the temptation to simply play whack-a-mole with every specious argument offered by those who claim to advocate “marriage equality.” While he answers such objections, he also does the reader the service of clarifying and simplifying the terms of the debate, showing how it is finally, starkly, the face-off between two irreconcilable views of marriage:

1. A “comprehensive — permanent and exclusive — union of sexually complementary spouses who engage in a comprehensive act that is inherently ordered toward a comprehensive good: the procreation and rearing of new human life.”
   and
2. An “intense emotional union — a romantic, care-giving union of consenting adults.”

As Anderson demonstrates, the first view is the one that has existed in every human society of which we have any record, even those that tolerated polygamy and extra-marital homosexual relationships. The second, impoverished view is the program of the Sexual Revolution, whose gradual implementation (beginning with no-fault, unilateral divorce) has seen the virtual collapse of marriage, the enormous suffering of children, the disappearance of two-parent families in large swathes of society — in other words, domestic chaos.

Anderson cites solid, peer-reviewed research to show the grave harm this social change has done to the most vulnerable people in America: the children of the poor. Our prisons are disproportionately full of boys who grew up without fathers, and our welfare rolls of young girls who were sexually exploited and made pregnant as young teenagers, in part because they had no father to protect them. They in turn are likely to raise children without their biological fathers. This cycle of dysfunction can all be traced to the loosening of the marriage bond, which is only further weakened when the law itself — and even the U.S. Constitution — is invoked by our nation’s highest authorities to affirm that sex has no permanent unitive meaning, and that children’s interests must play second fiddle to the emotional needs of adults.

You might think that same-sex “marriage” could improve the well-being of children, but Anderson cites statistics showing a clear correlation between its legal adoption in particular polities, and declines in the marriage and even the birth rate.

No man is an island, and no woman neither. But least of all are children, those fragile and needy creatures who depend on us for their present, who will populate our future. The acceptance of same-sex marriage, as Anderson doggedly demonstrates, is only the latest stage in our culture’s narcissistic rejection of responsibility toward the vulnerable.

Federal enforcement of a new, invented Constitutional “right” poses a threat to religious liberty and freedom of association. Anderson lays out the well-known (and some of the lesser-known) cases of same-sex marriage advocates using the state’s coercive power to harm innocent citizens who were acting on their conscience, who declined to assist with same-sex marriages. He correctly notes the grave danger posed to churches, citing the now-infamous exchange between Obama’s solicitor general and Justice Samuel Alito, in which the former admitted that churches who decline to perform same-sex marriages may well face the same legal and tax penalties applied in the past to segregationist sects.

This disaster can still be avoided. Anderson points out that same-sex marriage advocates would like the Obergefell v. Hodges decision to have the impact of Brown v. Board of Education, which quickly swept aside segregationist laws, gained the undisputed moral high ground, and summoned all the power of the federal government to enforce the long-overdue enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment for its original, intended purpose: the full enfranchisement and legal protection of African-Americans. Never mind that Obergefell’s arguments and impact would have horrified every single legislator who voted for that Amendment, which Justice Kennedy cites as the main legal groundwork for his arbitrary ruling.

As Anderson points out, another decision, equally controversial for its sweeping impact and blatant lack of support in the Constitution, had a very different impact. Roe v. Wade, which with its follow-up decisions legalized abortion for nine months for any reason, did not settle the question of the morality of abortion. It stymied but did not stifle all legal attempts to protect unborn Americans. Indeed, the pro-life movement has only gained in strength and popularity in subsequent decades. This precedent, Anderson argues, proves that Americans are not docile, that when a Court decision flouts our deepest moral sense, millions of citizens can be organized in the effort to correct it.

Truth Overruled is a solid, persuasive briefing book for any American who wishes to join in that urgent effort.