“Till death do us part” is being heard less and less now because America is parting with marriage. This is fine with too many today, even though some form of marriage has been the norm in every civilization we know of. Thus may those not irredeemably libertine want to consider how it has been said — with respect to the universality of sex differences, for example — that when a phenomenon is witnessed worldwide in every time and place, it’s a strong indication it has a biological component. Oh, this isn’t to say marriage is in our DNA, yet a social and psychological need it satisfies may be.
Speaking of social phenomena, among adults, married people will shortly be a minority in the United States. This is not, as some may say, just because of faux (“same-sex”) marriage. But that phenomenon is a major exacerbating factor and, quite significantly, is a deadly symptom of the underlying problem.
What’s more, the attack on “marriage has not stopped with same-sex relationships” (the extant underlying problem has ensured this), writes the Federalist’s Nathaneal Blake in a piece titled “The Death Of Marriage Proves Yet Again That Social Conservatives Were Right.” “After winning that fight, The New York Times has been enthusiastically pushing polyamory,” he continues. “This means polygamy is back, baby! All it needed was a quick makeover. America’s elite are happy to embrace polygamy — so long as it is relabeled as polyamory and waves the rainbow flag.”
“This effort is having an effect. Just look at Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the local government voted to recognize domestic partnerships of three or more people,” Blake then notes. “This is not some obscure hippie hamlet, but the home of Harvard University, and the law was developed with the help of the Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic. As coal-mine canaries go, this is a big bird.”
Blake states that this proves the traditionalist “Cassandras” were correct: During the faux marriage debates just seven to 15 years ago (which is ancient history in this childish Twitter time where fashions are deities), the sexual devolutionaries swore it was crazy to claim polygamy would be next. Of course, they were lying — either to us, themselves (via rationalization), or both. And now, “less than a decade later, they are vigorously pushing us down the slippery slope they insisted didn’t exist,” writes Blake. “Rod Dreher’s law of merited impossibility has an obvious corollary: ‘That will never happen, and it will be awesome when it does.’”
Awesome or loathsome, where we were headed was always obvious. Blake and others talked about how the continual “redefinition” of marriage wouldn’t stop — but they were wrong. The “redefinition” of marriage never actually started, and saying otherwise gives the sexual devolutionaries undeserved credit. Rather, they have “undefined” marriage.
As I’ve pointed out for years as a voice in the wilderness, leftists have not said marriage is, for example, the union between any two people. Doing so would render them just as “exclusionary” and “discriminatory” as those they decry and rob them of a hammer with which they bludgeon tradition. They’ve not offered any alternative, hard-and-fast boundaries for marriage. They’ve simply implied that the correct definition — the one accepted for ages in Western civilization — is wrong.
Yet this ensured that other activist-catalyzed “marriage” mutations would occur because an “undefinition” excludes nothing. Without boundaries, marriage is boiled down to taste, and other flavors will be indulged based on what feels right. That is, until marriage is boiled down to nothing. For if something can mean anything, it means nothing.
Yet not just reason but also experience pointed to this reality, even as we were debating marriage in 2004. It was that year that commentator Stanley Kurtz, in answer to the question “Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage?” noted: “It already has.”
“A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock,” he reported. “Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents.” And here’s the kicker:
“Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more,” Kurtz observed.
The issue? “Scandinavian gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood, is acceptable,” he explained.
Well, the libs always wanted us to be more like Sweden — and here we are.
Kurtz also correctly points out, however, that same-sex agitation wasn’t the first stake through marriage’s heart; rather, “it has further undermined the institution,” he wrote. This isn’t hard to understand.
Marriage has gradually been robbed of its uniqueness, and if we normal (“heterosexual”) people are honest with ourselves, we’ll realize that many among us contributed to the problem. Consider:
- First marriage was decoupled from its permanency (“Till death do us part”) with easy divorce.
- Second, the Sexual Devolution decoupled marriage from sexual activity via the acceptance of fornication and cohabitation.
- Next and as a consequence, marriage was decoupled from child-bearing and -rearing with the stigma removed from out-of-wedlock pregnancy.
- Then marriage was decoupled from heterosexuality with the acceptance of “domestic partnerships” and faux marriage.
So it’s no surprise marriage is now also being decoupled from the binary (two-people) standard, long the Western norm. Moreover, what’s encouraged isn’t even your great-great-great-great-great-(you get the idea)-grandfather’s polygamy, which “encourages powerful men to hoard reproductive opportunities,” as Blake puts it. Rather, it’s polyamory, which is hedonism-driven and “favors sterility.”
Yet marriage was also decoupled from something else, long before any of the aforementioned. There was a time when most Westerners considered the institution a sacrament, ordained by God himself. This is still the teaching of many churches.
Secularists may not believe this, but the logic is irrefutable. Consider: Most conservatives will emphasize, as the Founders maintained, that our rights come from God. After all, if He bestowed them, no worldly authority can rightly strip them. Is it any different with marriage?
“What God hath joined, let no man put asunder.” Once marriage was decoupled from the belief in its divine origin and hence unchangeable nature, it became a mere worldly institution — that the world could manipulate.
So what currently makes marriage unique in most Americans’ eyes? It really now is, to many people, “just a piece of paper.”
Why, though, does any of this matter? Blake writes that marriage “unites the two halves of the human race into a whole that bridges humanity’s past and future.” He also had written in a thoughtful 2018 piece, “Lifelong marriage is an act of defiance against all of the difficulties of life, from the catastrophic to the mundane. In marriage, men and women promise themselves to one another, and tell fate to go to hell.”
Put simply, however, marriage is the vehicle through which spouses are encouraged to fulfill their responsibilities to their children and to each other. The gold standard for family, pointed out the sociologists in the documentary Demographic Winter, is: children with a father and mother — united in matrimony.
The Truth is that if we want to MAGA, we’ll have to MAMA: make America marry again. Ponder this most seriously. For the lives we enrich, and the civilization we save, may be our own.
