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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Wed. 02/25/04 05:32:43 PM
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"Humpty Dumpty Logic" A stupendous essay on the perils of attempting to redefine/undefine marriage and how much damage has already been done to the institution, the nation, and especially to children by Orson Scott Card at The Ornery American, Feb. 15: .... 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.... (Thanks, Bryan.) [Follow-up: "For Better or for Worse?"] Lane Core Jr. CIW P Wed. 02/25/04 05:32:43 PM |
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