Approximately 20 years ago, then-prominent commentator Bill O’Reilly remarked on his erstwhile Fox News show that Americans would “never” accept faux (same-sex) marriage. As recently as 13 years ago, all 32 states that had voted on the matter rejected government faux marriage recognition. A year later, in 2010, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still pretended to believe that marriage was between “a man and a woman.” They later “evolved,” as politicians like to put it, and now the public has largely followed suit, with a May Gallup poll showing that 71 percent of Americans and 55 percent of Republicans believe these unions should be governmentally recognized. There’s a word for this: inurement.
Thus is it not surprising that, as ABC News puts it, some “Republicans see good politics in [the] same-sex marriage bill.” As the news organ writes:
When asked if he’d support legislation to protect same-sex marriage, one conservative Republican senator was almost nonchalant.
“I see no reason to oppose it,” Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters, bringing Democrats one vote closer to an unexpected victory as they move to safeguard same-sex marriage and other rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide.
Johnson’s answer, which came after 47 Republicans voted for the bill in the House last week, was reflective of a stark shift in GOP positioning after decades of fighting same-sex marriage. Ten years ago, most Republicans proudly espoused that marriage could only be between a man and a woman. Now, a federal law protecting same-sex marriage is within reach in an election year, with some Republican backing.
Of course, if Johnson sees no reason to oppose the bill, he clearly doesn’t see the Constitution, which makes marriage a state matter. But this is all about politics. What Johnson (and the other Republicans) does see are the polls; as for the more faux-marriage enthusiastic Democrats, they see a possible chance to rally the troops, as the ironically named Respect for Marriage Act (RMA) is a way for them to appear to be defending their base from what they’ve demagogically portrayed as a rogue, rights-rending Supreme Court. (In reality, the Court could strike down the RMA just as they could Obergefell v. Hodges.)
The larger issue, however, is that this “evolution” reflects a cultural shift, another example of how America is “going European”: “Conservative” politicians in western Europe have long tolerated or even supported faux marriage and the second-wave sexual devolutionary agenda.
Lest anyone think this renders them something less than conservative, consider that a conservative conserves — and what he conserves is often determined by how those change agents called liberals influenced the status quo yesterday. Thus did the astute G.K. Chesterton remark approximately a century ago that the “business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
Yet the business of those not progressive or conservative — neither new fashioned nor old fashioned but eternally fashioned — is to see beyond the times and to the timeless. Of course, others will wonder why this even matters in a period of such domestic turmoil; “Marriage is a settled issue,” they may say. But if turmoil results from cultural rot, and if cultural rot is at least exacerbated by the dissolution of that central building block of civilization, the family, is it at all possible that the decline of marriage, a central building block of the family, can help spark societal turmoil?
For sure is that marriage isn’t “settled,” and it’s not just that something can’t be truly settled in a lie. It’s that it always was also a lie, or at least an untruth, to say the Left was “redefining” marriage. They did no such thing.
They “undefined” it.
That is to say, they never provided a hard and fast alternative definition of marriage such as, “The union of any two adults in an amorous relationship.” Rather, they simply attacked the correct (traditional) definition of marriage — just as they now attack the definitions of “woman” and “recession” — and called it intolerance-born exclusion.
Of course, establishing their own definition would have undermined their argument. For definitions by definition set boundaries, limits, and this would have made them exclusionary just like the traditionalists they impugned.
The problem is that by excluding nothing definitionally they opened the door to everything theoretically. If homosexuals have a “right” to something we still call “marriage” based on the notion of human rights, how do you rationally exclude other humans’ conception of “marriage,” be they polygamists or those “wedding” animals, holograms, dolls, or robots (yes, such has happened)? Marriage under this standard is no longer a matter of Truth but taste, and is thus demoted from priority to preference. In fact, since an “undefinition” excludes nothing, to undefine something is to, in a sense, make it disappear.
And marriage in practice is disappearing. To grasp why this matters and the institution isn’t just “a piece of paper,” ponder its universality. As ThoughtCo puts it, “Marriage is considered by sociologists to be a cultural universal; that is, it exists in some form in all societies. Marriage serves important social functions, and social norms often determine the role each spouse takes in a marriage.”
Of course, different cultures did/do sometimes have different definitions of marriage — but they are nonetheless definitions. The institution’s universality should give pause for thought, too; after all, even those not believing it’s ordained by God (i.e., the Sacrament of Marriage) should realize that, in the least, its ubiquity bespeaks of how it satisfies some common human need. But what might this be?
Ambassador Alan Keyes once put it well, stating (I’m paraphrasing), “Marriage provides spouses with an incentive to fulfill their responsibilities to their children and to each other.” Research may bear this out, too.
Just consider Stanley Kurtz’s long 2004 essay “The End of Marriage in Scandinavia: The ‘conservative case’ for same-sex marriage collapses.” Kurtz wrote that “the studies that have been done show that throughout Scandinavia (and the West) cohabiting couples with children break up at two to three times the rate of married parents. So rising rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth stand as proxy for rising rates of family dissolution.”
The issue is that accepting faux marriage further decouples marriage from parenthood — the institution’s main purpose — in people’s minds. As Kurtz also wrote:
Gay marriage is both an effect and a reinforcing cause of the separation of marriage and parenthood. In states like Sweden and Denmark, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were already very high, and the public favored gay marriage, gay unions were an effect of earlier changes. Once in place, gay marriage symbolically ratified the separation of marriage and parenthood. And once established, gay marriage became one of several factors contributing to further increases in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birthrates, as well as to early divorce. But in Norway, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were lower, religion stronger, and the public opposed same-sex unions, gay marriage had an even greater role in precipitating marital decline.
Kurtz’s essay is extremely lengthy and thus impossible to do justice to here. But suffice it to say that the faux marriage advocates were always right about one thing: The wider society did more than its part, decades ago, to damage marriage (e.g., acceptance of cohabitation). This doesn’t justify, however, exacerbating the problem by compounding mistakes.
Put simply, just as many rightly point out today that letting anyone identify as a woman erases women, letting people identify marriage as anything they want erases marriage. The good news is that, as the paraphrase of economist Herb Stein goes, “If something can’t go on, it won’t.”
Something wrongly settled is not settled at all and will not stand the test of time.
