The Gay Marriage Question

What is it that we want? Apart from our natural conservative instinct that warns us against the innovation of gay marriage, what really is our problem?

And we should also think: what do the advocates of gay marriage want? Marriage activist Maggie Gallagher asks this latter question.

Given that the California Supreme Court (and the US Supreme Court with its Guantanamo Bay decision) demostrates that the elite’s commitment to judicial activism is still at full speed ahead, we should look at what advanced legal circles are thinking on marriage, she writes.

If a court can rule that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right (i.e., one deeply rooted in our nation’s traditions) then it can make up anything. Elite legal minds get to figure out what they think and break it to the rest of us once they’ve decided.

What the elite has decided, Maggie thinks, is that “gay is the new black.” That means that opponents to the gay agenda will be treated like the old racist South.

[O]nce the principle is in the law, the next step will be to use the law to stigmatize, marginalize, and repress those who disagree with the government’s new views on marriage and sexual orientation.

That is what they are doing in Canada already, of course. That is why Mark Steyn and Maclean’s were up before the British Columbia human rights tribunal for saying hateful things about Muslims.

In my view this progressive tide still has a ways to run. It may start to ebb if it starts if it has negative effects on the liberal elite. But that is unlikely. More likely would be the total destruction of the poor.

No, our best hope is women. All the stuff about equal rights and love in the context of marriage is a misunderstanding of marriage as a social institution, and pretty soon women are going to figure it out.

Society needs marriage because women need marriage. Women need marriage because they need a social system to bind the father of their children to them. This gives them two advantages. It protects them from sexual predation, and it provides resources for their children.

The last century has been an outlier, as women emerged from millennia of subsistence living, when all their effort was focused on bearing and raising children. Their first impulse was to liberate themselves, the “victims of the species,” from their enslavement to the three Ks, kuche, kirche, kinder.

They liked the welfare state; they liked the benefits; they liked the idea of getting away from an abusive husband. Then they liked the idea of getting away from a spouse that wasn’t sensitive to their needs for conversation and companionship.

One day soon we will see this century-long tide crest and start to recede.

Because you can make a pretty good argument that, objectively, women get treated best by a system of lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Right now educated, professional young women are beginning this trend. Before too long it will penetrate down into the mass culture. More and more women will start to say, regarding children, that “three is the new two,” and that careers are for the birds.

If you want three children, then you need a husband.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close 0