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 A little dialogue from Lewis Carroll:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty
said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I
choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether
you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty
Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
The Massachusetts Supreme Court has not
yet declared that "day" shall now be construed to
include that which was formerly known as "night," but
it might as well.
By declaring that homosexual couples are
denied their constitutional rights by being forbidden to "marry," it
is treading on the same ground.
Do you want to know whose constitutional
rights are being violated? Everybody's. Because no constitution
in the United States has ever granted the courts the right
to make vast, sweeping changes in the law to reform society.
Regardless of their opinion of homosexual "marriage," every
American who believes in democracy should be outraged that
any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social
innovation without recourse to democratic process.
And we all know the course this thing will
follow. Anyone who opposes this edict will be branded a bigot;
any schoolchild who questions the legitimacy of homosexual “marriage” will
be expelled for "hate speech." The fanatical Left
will insist that anyone who upholds the fundamental meaning
that marriage has always had, everywhere, until this generation,
is a "homophobe" and therefore mentally ill.
Which is the modern Jacobin equivalent
of crying, "Off with their heads!"
We will once again be performing a potentially
devastating social experiment on ourselves without any attempt
to predict the consequences and find out if the American people
actually want them.
But anyone who has any understanding of
how America -- or any civilization -- works, of the forces
already at play, will realize that this new diktat of the courts
will not have any of the intended effects, while the unintended
effects are likely to be devastating.
Marriage Is Already Open to Everyone.
In the first place, no law in any state
in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals
to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality
in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry
a man.
Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman
to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights
of husbandhood under the law. And, in fact, many homosexual
men have done precisely that, without any legal prejudice at
all.
Ditto with lesbian women. Many have married
men and borne children. And while a fair number of such marriages
in recent years have ended in divorce, there are many that
have not.
So it is a flat lie to say that homosexuals
are deprived of any civil right pertaining to marriage. To
get those civil rights, all homosexuals have to do is find
someone of the opposite sex willing to join them in marriage.
In order to claim that they are deprived, you have to change the meaning of "marriage" to
include a relationship that it has never included before this
generation, anywhere on earth.
Just because homosexual partners wish to
be called "married" and wish to force everyone else
around them to regard them as "married," does not
mean that their Humpty-Dumpty-ish wish should be granted at
the expense of the common language, democratic process, and
the facts of human social organization.
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual
lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not
marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating
it as if it were.
Marrying Is Hard to Do.
Men and women, from childhood on, have
very different biological and social imperatives. They are
naturally disposed to different reproductive strategies; men
are (on average) larger and stronger; the relative levels of
various hormones, the difference in the rate of maturity, and
many other factors make it far, far easier for women to get
along with other women and men to get along with men.
Men, after all, know what men like far
better than women do; women know how women think and feel far
better than men do. But a man and a woman come together as
strangers and their natural impulses remain at odds throughout
their lives, requiring constant compromise, suppression of
natural desires, and an unending effort to learn how to get
through the intersexual swamp.
And yet, throughout the history of human
society -- even in societies that tolerated relatively open
homosexuality at some stages of life -- it was always expected
that children would be born into and raised by families consisting
of a father and mother.
And in those families where one or both
parents were missing, usually because of death, either stepparents,
adoptive parents, or society in general would step in to provide,
not just nurturing, but also the appropriate role models.
It is a demonstrated tendency -- as well
as the private experience of most people -- that when we become
parents, we immediately find ourselves acting out most of the
behaviors we observed in the parent of our own sex. We have
to consciously make an effort to be different from them.
We also expect our spouse to behave, as
a parent, in the way we have learned to expect from the experiences
we had with our opposite-sex parent -- that's why so many men
seem to marry women just like their mother, and so many women
to marry men just like their father. It takes conscious effort
to break away from this pattern.
So not only are two sexes required in order
to conceive children, children also learn their sex-role expectations
from the parents in their own family. This is precisely what
large segments of the Left would like to see break down. And
if it is found to have unpleasant results, they will, as always,
insist that the cure is to break down the family even further.
The War On Marriage
Of course, in our current society we are
two generations into the systematic destruction of the institution
of marriage. In my childhood, it was rare to know someone whose
parents were divorced; now, it seems almost as rare to find
someone whose parents have never been divorced.
And a growing number of children grow up
in partial families not because of divorce, but because there
never was a marriage at all.
The damage caused to children by divorce
and illegitimate birth is obvious and devastating. While apologists
for the current system are quick to blame poverty resulting
from "deadbeat dads" as the cause, the children themselves
know this is ludicrous.
There are plenty of poor families with
both parents present whose children grow up knowing they are
loved and having good role models from both parents.
And there are plenty of kids whose divorced
parents have scads of money -- but whose lives are deformed
by the absence of one of their parents in their lives.
Most broken or wounded families are in
that condition because of a missing father. There is substantial
and growing evidence that our society's contempt for the role
of the father in the family is responsible for a massive number
of "lost" children.
Only when the father became powerless or
absent in the lives of huge numbers of children did we start
to realize some of the things people need a father for: laying
the groundwork for a sense of moral judgment; praise that is
believed so that it can instill genuine self-confidence.
People lacking in fundamental self-esteem
don't need gold stars passed out to everyone in their class.
Chances are, they need a father who will say -- and mean -- "I'm
proud of you."
This is an oversimplification of a very
complex system. There are marriages that desperately need to
be dissolved for the safety of the children, for instance,
and divorced parents who do a very good job of keeping both
parents closely involved in the children's lives.
But you have to be in gross denial not
to know that children would almost always rather have grown
up with Dad and Mom in their proper places at home. Most kids
would rather that, instead of divorcing, their parents would
acquire the strength or maturity to stop doing the things that
make the other parent want to leave.
Marriage Is Everybody's Business.
And it isn't just the damage that divorce
and out-of-wedlock births do to the children in those broken
families: Your divorce hurts my kids, too.
All American children grow up today in
a society where they are keenly aware that marriages don't
last. At the first sign of a quarrel even in a stable marriage
that is in no danger, the children fear divorce. Is this how
it begins? Will I now be like my friends at school, shunted
from half-family to half-family?
This is not trivial damage. Kids thrive
best in an environment that teaches them how to be adults.
They need the confidence and role models that come from a stable
home with father and mother in their proper places.
So long before the Massachusetts Supreme
Court decided to play Humpty Dumpty, the American people had
plunged into a terrible experiment on ourselves, guided only
by the slogan of immaturity and barbarism: "If it feels
good, do it!"
Civilization depends on people deliberately
choosing not to do many things that feel good at the
time, in order to accomplish more important, larger purposes.
Having an affair; breaking up a marriage; oh, those can feel
completely justified and the reasons very important at the
time.
But society has a vital stake in child-rearing;
and children have a vital stake in society.
Monogamous marriage is by far the most
effective foundation for a civilization. It provides most males
an opportunity to mate (polygamous systems always result in
surplus males that have no reproductive stake in society);
it provides most females an opportunity to have a mate who
is exclusively devoted to her. Those who are successful in
mating are the ones who will have the strongest loyalty to
the social order; so the system that provides reproductive
success to the largest number is the system that will be most
likely to keep a civilization alive.
Monogamy depends on the vast majority of
society both openly and privately obeying the rules. Since
the natural reproductive strategy for males is to mate with
every likely female at every opportunity, males who are not
restrained by social pressure and expectations will soon devolve
into a sort of Clintonesque chaos, where every man takes what
he can get.
Civilization Is Rooted in Reproductive
Security.
There is a very complex balance in maintaining
a monogamous society, with plenty of lapses and exceptions
and mechanisms to cope with the natural barbaric impulses of
the male mating drive. There is always room to tolerate a small
and covert number of exceptions to the rule.
But the rule must be largely observed,
and must be seen to be observed even more than it actually
is. If trust between the sexes breaks down, then males who
are able will revert to the broadcast strategy of reproduction,
while females will begin to compete for males who already have
female mates. It is a reproductive free-for-all.
Civilization requires the suppression of
natural impulses that would break down the social order. Civilization
thrives only when most members can be persuaded to behave unnaturally,
and when those who don't follow the rules are censured in a
meaningful way.
Why would men submit to rules that deprive
them of the chance to satisfy their natural desire to mate
with every attractive female?
Why would women submit to rules that keep
them from trying to mate with the strongest (richest, most
physically imposing, etc.) male, just because he already has
a wife?
Because civilization provides the best
odds for their children to live to adulthood. So even though
civilized individuals can't pursue the most obviously pleasurable
and selfish (i.e., natural) strategies for reproduction, the
fact is that they are far more likely to be successful at reproduction
in a civilized society -- whether they personally like the rules or not.
Civilizations that enforce rules of marriage
that give most males and most females a chance to have children
that live to reproduce in their turn are the civilizations
that last the longest. It's such an obvious principle that
few civilizations have even attempted to flout it.
Even if the political system changes, as
long as the marriage rules remain intact, the civilization
can go on.
Balancing Family and Society
There's a lot of quid pro quo in civilization,
though. Not all parents are good providers, for instance. So
society, in one way or another, must provide for the children
whose parents are either incapable or irresponsible.
Society must also step in to protect children
from abusive adults; and the whole society must act in loco parentis, watching out for each other's children, trusting that someone
else is also watching out for their own.
The degree of trust can be enormous. We
send our children to school for an enormous portion of their
childhood, trusting that the school will help civilize them
while we parents devote more of our time to providing for them
materially (or caring for younger children not yet in school).
At the same time, parents recognize that
non-parents are not as trustworthy caretakers. The school provides
some aspects of civilization, but not others. Schools expect
the parents to civilize their children in certain ways in order
to take part safely with other children; parents expect to
be left alone with some aspects of child-rearing, such as religion.
In other words, there are countless ways
that parents and society at large are constantly negotiating
to find the best balance between the parents' natural desire
to protect their children -- their entrants in the reproductive
lottery -- and the civilization's need to bring the greatest
number of children, not just to adulthood, but to parenthood as committed members of the society who
will teach their children to also be good citizens.
America's Anti-Family Experiment
In this delicate balance, it is safe to
say that beginning with a trickle in the 1950s, but becoming
an overwhelming flood in the 1960s and 1970s, we took a pretty
good system, and in order to solve problems that needed tweaking,
we made massive, fundamental changes that have had devastating
consequences.
Now huge numbers of Americans know that
the schools are places where their children are indoctrinated
in anti-family values. Trust is not just going -- for them
it's gone.
Huge numbers of children are deprived of
two-parent homes, because society has decided to give legal
status and social acceptance to out-of-wedlock parenting and
couples who break up their marriages with little regard for
what is good for the children.
The result is a generation of children
with no trust in marriage who are mating in, at best, merely "marriage-like" patterns,
and bearing children with no sense of responsibility to society
at large; while society is trying to take on an ever greater
role in caring for the children who are suffering -- while
doing an increasingly bad job of it.
Parents in a stable marriage are much better
than schools at civilizing children. You have to be a fanatical
ideologue not to recognize this as an obvious truth -- in other
words, you have to dumb down or radically twist the definition
of "civilizing children" in order to claim that parents
are not, on the whole, better at it.
We are so far gone down this road that
it would take a wrenching, almost revolutionary social change
to reverse it. And with the forces of P.C. orthodoxy insisting
that the solutions to the problems they have caused is ever-larger
doses of the disease, it is certain that any such revolution
would be hotly contested.
Now, in the midst of this tragic collapse
of marriage, along comes the Massachusetts Supreme Court, attempting
to redefine marriage in a way that is absurdly irrelevant to
any purpose for which society needs marriage in the first place.
Humpty Has Struck Before.
We've already seen similar attempts at
redefinition. The ideologues have demanded that we stop defining "families" as
Dad, Mom, and the kids. Now any grouping of people might be called a "family."
But this doesn't turn them into families,
or even make rational people believe they're families. It just
makes it politically unacceptable to use the word family in any meaningful way.
The same thing will happen to the word marriage if the Massachusetts decision is allowed
to stand, and is then enforced nationwide because of the "full
faith and credit" clause in the Constitution.
Just because you give legal sanction to
a homosexual couple and call their contract a "marriage" does
not make it a marriage. It simply removes marriage as a legitimate word for the real thing.
If you declare that there is no longer
any legal difference between low tide and high tide, it might
stop people from publishing tide charts, but it won't change
the fact that sometimes the water is lower and sometimes it's
higher.
Calling a homosexual contract "marriage" does
not make it reproductively relevant and will not make it contribute
in any meaningful way to the propagation of civilization.
In fact, it will do harm. Nowhere near
as much harm as we have already done through divorce and out-of-wedlock
childbearing. But it's another nail in the coffin. Maybe the
last nail, precisely because it is the most obvious and outrageous
attack on what is left of marriage in America.
Supporters of homosexual "marriage" dismiss
warnings like mine as the predictable ranting of people who
hate progress. But the Massachusetts Supreme Court has made
its decision without even a cursory attempt to ascertain the
social costs. The judges have taken it on faith that it will
do no harm.
You can't add a runway to an airport in
America without years of carefully researched environmental
impact statements. But you can radically reorder the fundamental
social unit of society without political process or serious
research.
Let me put it another way. The sex life
of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality
of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between
us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn't bothered
them. That's what tolerance looks like.
But homosexual "marriage" is
an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special
preference for marriage in society -- to erase the protected
status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization
and individual reproduction.
So if my friends insist on calling what
they do "marriage," they are not turning their relationship
into what my wife and I have created, because no court has
the power to change what their relationship actually is.
Instead they are attempting to strike a
death blow against the well-earned protected status of our,
and every other, real marriage.
They steal from me what I treasure most,
and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married.
They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes.
The Propaganda Mill
What happens now if children grow up in
a society that overtly teaches that homosexual partnering is
not "just as good as" but actually is marriage?
Once this is regarded as settled law, anyone
who tries to teach children to aspire to create a child-centered
family with a father and a mother will be labeled as a bigot
and accused of hate speech.
Can you doubt that the textbooks will be
far behind? Any depictions of "families" in schoolbooks
will have to include a certain proportion of homosexual "marriages" as
positive role models.
Television programs will start to show
homosexual "marriages" as wonderful and happy (even
as they continue to show heterosexual marriages as oppressive
and conflict-ridden).
The propaganda mill will pound our children
with homosexual “marriage” as a role model. We know this will
happen because we have seen the fanatical Left do it many times
before.
So when our children go through the normal
adolescent period of sexual confusion and perplexity, which
is precisely the time when parents have the least influence over their children and most
depend on the rest of society to help their children grow through
the last steps before adulthood, what will happen?
Already any child with any kind of sexual
attraction to the same sex is told that this is an irresistible
destiny, despite the large number of heterosexuals who move
through this adolescent phase and never look back.
Already any child with androgynous appearance
or mannerisms -- effeminite boys and masculine girls -- are
being nurtured and guided (or taunted and abused) into "accepting" what
many of them never suspected they had -- a desire to permanently
move into homosexual society.
In other words, society will bend all its
efforts to seize upon any hint of homosexuality in our young
people and encourage it.
Now, there is a myth that homosexuals are "born
that way," and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly
that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have
proved it.
In fact what evidence there is suggests
that if there is a genetic component to homosexuality, an entire
range of environmental influences are also involved. While
there is no scientific research whatsoever that indicates that
there is no such thing as a borderline child who could go either
way.
Those who claim that there is "no
danger" and that homosexuals are born, not made, are simply
stating their faith.
The dark secret of homosexual society --
the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals
first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction
or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn
to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
It's that desire for normality, that discontent
with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly
behind this hunger for homosexual "marriage."
They are unhappy, but they think it's because
the rest of us "don't fully accept them."
Homosexual "marriage" won't accomplish
what they hope. They will still be just as far outside the reproductive
cycle of life. And they will have inflicted real damage on
those of us who are inside it.
They will make it harder for us to raise
children with any confidence that they, in turn, will take
their place in the reproductive cycle. They will use all the
forces of our society to try to encourage our children that
it is desirable to be like them.
Most kids won't be swayed, because the
message of the hormones is clear for them. But for those parents
who have kids who hover in confusion, their lives complicated
by painful experiences, conflicting desires, and many fears,
the P.C. elite will now demand that the full machinery of the
state be employed to draw them away from the cycle of life.
Children from broken and wounded families,
with missing parents, may be the ones most confused and most
susceptible. Instead of society helping these children overcome
the handicaps that come from a missing or dysfunctional father
or mother, it may well be exacerbating the damage.
All the while, the P.C. elite will be shouting
at dismayed parents that it is somehow evil and bigoted of
them not to rejoice when their children commit themselves to
a reproductive dead end.
But there is nothing irrational about parents
grieving at the abduction-in-advance of their grandchildren.
Don't you see the absurd contradiction?
A postulated but unproven genetic disposition toward homosexuality
is supposed to be embraced and accepted by everyone as "perfectly
natural" -- but the far stronger and almost universal
genetic disposition toward having children and grandchildren
is to be suppressed, kept to yourself, treated as a mental
illness.
You're unhappy that your son wants to marry
a boy? Then you're sick, dangerous, a homophobe, filled with
hate. Control your natural desires or be branded as evil by
every movie and TV show coming out of P.C. Hollywood!
Compassion and tolerance flow only one
way in the "Wonderland" of the politically correct.
Loss of Trust
The proponents of this anti-family revolution
are counting on most Americans to do what they have done through
every stage of the monstrous social revolution that we are
still suffering through -- nothing at all.
But that "nothing" is deceptive.
In fact, the pro-family forces are already taking their most
decisive action. It looks like "nothing" to the anti-family,
politically correct elite, because it isn't using their ranting
methodology.
The pro-family response consists of quietly
withdrawing allegiance from the society that is attacking the
family.
Would-be parents take part in civilization
only when they trust society to enhance their chances of raising
children who will, in turn, reproduce. Societies that create
that trust survive; societies that lose it, disappear, one
way or another.
But the most common way is for the people
who have the most at stake -- parents and would-be parents
-- to simply make the untrusted society disappear by ceasing
to lift a finger to sustain it.
It is parents who have the greatest ability
to transmit a culture from one generation to the next.
If parents stop transmitting the culture
of the American elite to their children, and actively resist
letting the schools and media do it in their place, then that
culture will disappear.
If America becomes a place where the laws
of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists -- which
is what the Massachusetts decision actually does -- then our
allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our
allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.
We will teach our children to have no loyalty
to the culture of the American elite, and will instead teach
them to be loyal to a competing culture that upholds the family.
Whether we home school our kids or not, we will withdraw them
at an early age from any sense of belonging to contemporary
American culture.
We're already far down that road. Already
most parents regard schools -- an institution of the state
that most directly touches our children -- as the enemy, even
though we like and trust the individual teachers -- because
we perceive, correctly, that schools are being legally obligated
to brainwash our children to despise the values that keep civilization
alive.
And if marriage itself ceases to exist
as a legally distinct social union with protection from the
government, then why in the world should we trust that government
enough to let it have authority over our children?
They Think They Have the Power.
The politically correct elite think they
have the power to make these changes, because they control
the courts.
They don't have to consult the people,
because the courts nowadays have usurped the power to make
new law.
Democracy? What a joke. These people hate putting questions like this to a vote. Like any
good totalitarians, they know what's best for the people, and
they'll force it down our throats any way they can.
That's what the Democratic filibuster in
the Senate to block Bush's judicial appointments is all about
-- to keep the anti-family values of the Massachusetts Supreme
Court in control of our government.
And when you add this insult onto the already
deep injuries to marriage caused by the widespread acceptance
of nonmonogamous behavior, will there be anything left at all?
Sure. In my church and many other churches,
people still cling fiercely to civilized values and struggle
to raise civilized children despite the barbarians who now
rule us through the courts.
The barbarians think that if they grab
hold of the trunk of the tree, they've caught the birds in
the branches. But the birds can fly to another tree.
And I don't mean that civilized Americans
will move. I mean that they'll simply stop regarding the authority
of the government as having any legitimacy.
It is the most morally conservative portion
of society that is most successful in raising children who
believe in loyalty and oath-keeping and self-control and self-sacrifice.
And we're tired of being subject to barbarian
rules and laws that fight against our civilized values. We're
not interested in risking our children's lives to defend a
nation that does not defend us.
Who do you think is volunteering for the
military to defend America against our enemies? Those who believe
in the teachings of politically correct college professors?
Or those who believe in the traditional values that the politically
correct elite has been so successful in destroying?
Let's take a poll of our volunteer military
-- especially those who specialize in combat areas -- and see
what civilization it is that they actually volunteered to defend.
Since the politically correct are loudly
unwilling to fight or die for their version of America, and they are actively
trying to destroy the version of America that traditional Americans are willing to fight or die to defend, just how long
will "America" last, once they've driven out the
traditional culture?
Oh, it will still be called America.
But out of the old American mantras of "democracy" and "freedom" and "home" and "family," of "motherhood" and "apple
pie," only the pie will be left.
And even if few people care enough to defend
the old family values against the screaming hate speech of
the Left -- which is what they're counting on, of course --
the end will be the same. Because with marriage finally killed,
America will no longer be able to raise up children with any trust in
or loyalty to or willingness to sacrifice for that society.
So either civilized people will succeed
in establishing a government that protects the family; or civilized
people will withdraw their allegiance from the government that
won't protect it; or the politically correct barbarians will
have complete victory over the family -- and, lacking
the strong family structure on which civilization depends,
our civilization will collapse or fade away.
Remember how long Iraq's powerful military
lasted against a determined enemy, when the Iraqi soldiers
no longer had any loyalty to the Iraqi leadership. That wasn't
an aberration. It's how great nations and empires fall.
Depriving us of any democratic voice in
these sweeping changes may not lead to revolution or even resistance.
But it will be just as deadly if it leads to despair. For in
the crisis, few citizens will lift a finger to protect or sustain
the elite that treated the things we valued -- our marriages,
our children, and our right to self-government -- with such
contempt.
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