And I'll admit, that is a concern for some folks. But I'm going to guess that the time between the third child and the fourth child was way shorter than the twenty-five years that my vasectomy has had to "take". After awhile, the body just manufactures antibodies to destroy sperm, this is one of the things that thwarts reversals.
The point is that despite individual accidents of health, fertility, or whatever, a marriage between a man and a woman, as a general rule, results in babies as a natural consequence.
They certainly do. But we do not make having those babies as a condition of getting the benefits society confers on the married couple. Heterosexual people can find someone of the other gender and marry them even if they have an absolutely firm intention to never procreate. Society gains the benefit of two people willing to care for each other in a relationship of mutual fidelity, that is itself a stabilizing influence.
Using the lower animals as a model for human behavior is reductionist and ridiculous.
I was just making the point that it was merely a heterosexual sex act that is responsible for creation of the vast majority of new animal life. In this respect, we humans share a characteristic with other animal life.
I work in the justice system, and you would be surprised...
May I suggest that your experience is not typical? Homosexual couples who have successful adoption experiences would not have their names coming across your desk. It's like the women who work with child support collection. They see only the men who are skunks, and they tend to generalize about all men being that way. When I did title examinations, and had to call up the Department of Social and Health Services to find out the amount of a child support lien, I found it more advantageous to have a female co-worker call for the information, I was often treated as the "enemy".
The fact that some well-intentioned couples have adopted AIDs babies is a star in their crown, but they are not all that common.
That's because we've been successful at preventing the transmission of AIDS/HIV to babies, in ways that we weren't back in the 1980's. Antiviral drugs really have reduced the number of children born with this condition.
Marriage has been both a religious and a social construct for as long as there has been society, because otherwise kids don't know who their daddies are and daddies don't know who their babies are.
And the situation you describe has been a norm, too. Affairs have been going on for as long as there have been men and women. Many kids throughout history have not known who their daddies are. Maybe some of them had fathers who were those Scandiavian warriors you were talking about!
The social purpose of marriage is to legitimize offspring and thus reassure the father that his genetic potential is actually being carried on.
That was the social purpose of fidelity of women, to assure a man that the children he was providing for were his. And we did wrap it up in the institution of marriage. But since we have been able to effectively separate sex from reproduction, we now have marriages that need not be "fruitful" to use your term. Same sex relationships have that characteristic in common with those non-childbearing heterosexual marriages.
Somebody at work said just yesterday about these sperm banks where donors are used over and over again, "We're going to have people marrying their sisters."
Perhaps, but that would concern laws that are used to deal with sperm banks, they have nothing to do with the evolving definition of civil marriage.
Illegitimate children conceived inside a marriage have certainly occurred since the dawn of marriage. "Rocking the cradle and none of my own" is a well known folk song. But again, you can't make a general rule based on the exception created by the very people who violate the rule. That lets the lawbreakers make the rules -- which is essentially what's going on now. Allow people who have violated the social construct of marriage to say, "O.K., we've broken the rules so you now ought to get rid of the rules altogether" and you're letting the lunatics run the asylum. I'm sure burglars, murderers and embezzlers would LOVE such a rule -- and certainly there's a lot of burglary, murder and embezzlement going on.
My experience isn't limited to the court system by any means. My mom has been a professional dancer since 1948, so I have had ample opportunity to view the Atlanta homosexual community at close range. Even leaving aside those who fall afoul of the criminal law, it's not a healthy environment for children. In fact, it's not a healthy environment for the participants, either, but that's an argument for another day.