ONE OF THE FINEST PIECES ON THE MISCARRIAGE OF SANITY AND THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO DEGENERACY IN THE QUESTION OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE I'VE EVER READ:
FOR A FAMOUS instance of same-sex marriage, the first in the recorded history of the West, we can read Suetonius’ account in The Twelve Caesars of the emperor Nero’s betrothal to a certain Sporus, going through “a wedding ceremony with him — dowry, bridal veil, and all — which the whole court attended.” Nero couldn’t get enough of what he reckoned a good thing and later married his freedman Doryphyrus. This exercise was only one among many of Nero’s extravagances, but it is symptomatic of an accelerating cultural degeneracy......
Recent legislation favoring same-sex marriage is not, in my view, an indicator of a compassionate and socially progressive culture as many have automatically presumed.
It is, rather, a prime indicator of decadence, the weakening of common sense, and the dissipation of belief in a common future.
What we do in our private lives is for the most part our own business, but in the public sphere the disciplined adherence to the principle of continuity is indispensable. The fiscal and social amenities that accrue to the married condition are a form of recompensation, a reward for the duties of procreation and bringing up children in, ideally, a stable environment.
There is no reason for gay unions to profit from status recognition, tax breaks, pension and inheritance rights, family courts, civil enactments, and the like. These are privileges that must be earned and that reflect the labor and sacrifice involved in the reproduction of the generations.
What else is there that renders us deserving of such exemptions and prerogatives? Unions which are in their nature unreproductive do not merit special dispensation by the state, as if Big Brother had turned into Big Daddy.
This is not a moral question we are debating but a civilizational requisite we forfeit at our peril.
The issue is not the bed but the altar. People can sleep with whom they wish, live with whom they want, but legal vetting and economic advantages are properly accorded to the progenitive or, since not all marriages are fecund, the potentially fertile. The beneficiaries of legal recognition and appropriate indemnification should be those who have invested in, or are at least capable of endowing, the larger social enterprise, namely, perpetuation.
We have now entered the realm of farce. The Ontario Court of Appeal, for example, adjudicating a case in which a lesbian couple accepted a sperm donation from a homosexual friend, decided that a child may have two legal mothers and that the donor father may claim access. Clearly, marriage and the nuclear family are being reconstrued out of existence by a Carrollian judiciary since the precedent that has been established is effectively non-containable.
Indeed, Piet Hein Donner, Dutch minister of justice, has recently pleaded the case for the legitimacy of polyamorous “group marriage.”
Adding to the element of burlesque is the fact that it is now the gay community among the secular population that appears to have become the most outspoken stakeholder in the traditional institution of marriage. No matter. There is little future in an empty crèche.
Pregnancy in the developed world has tended to become something of a fashion statement and marriage a ritual performance to validate the barren. As Claire Berlinski writes in her dirge for a civilization, Menace in Europe, “Not since the Great Plague has Europe’s population been so dramatically gutted,” the reproductive replacement rate plunging sharply below the magic number of 2.1.
Only in those Western nations still committed to preserving their historical and cultural lineage do the numbers resist erosion: the United States, which — up to now at any rate — has maintained the ratio, and Israel, which exceeds it.
It is truly as if we no longer wish to perpetuate ourselves and to take custodial responsibility for the future but instead prefer to knit our energies and loyalties to a convergent present, the acquisition of ancillaries, career and sensations, immediate remunerations, the cult of private pleasure, and political infatuations that pander to our easy sense of righteousness and our emotional autism.
The global warming hysteria with its avowed planetary solicitude does not invalidate the hypothesis. Based on demonstrably incomplete science and riven by contradictions and bogus claims, the ecological crescendo has become a process whereby the New Age pursuit of self-esteem and “self-realization” is magnified as the salvation of the earth. It has not occurred to our environmental zealots that without children, there is no afterward, regardless of the temperature.
In effect, the Western individual has “progressively” tended to become a pure consumer preoccupied chiefly with the aggrandizement of self, owing as often as not to his or her credentials as a member of some presumably marginalized class, group, organization, or faction. Profiting from an ethnology of complaint, resentment, immunity, and special treatment, he or she manifests as what the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus called a “desiring machine...”
This condition of domestic recreancy and unfettered emotivity comprises, as much as anything else, a “clear and present danger.” It is a danger that may assume many different forms, including, as we have seen, the social redefinition of marriage in terms of the couple rather than in terms of the children.
As Allan Bloom (despite his own sexual leanings) cogently argued in The Closing of the American Mind, since the family must be understood as both the nucleus and reflection of the larger civilization, the fate of the latter cannot be separated from that of the former.
It is important that the distinction I am making between same-sex unions and same-sex marriage is not interpreted as a form of homophobia. What I am saying is that, unlike the freedom to choose one’s erotic or live-in partners, same-sex marriage is not a civil rights issue, as many activists erroneously claim. Rather, it is the right to express one’s sexual orientation without fear of repressive legal measures or state persecution that qualifies as a civil rights issue.
But the legal and plenary status of traditional marriage is integral to the welfare and propagation of culture, society, and civilization and must therefore be safeguarded.
Gays have come out of the closet and entered common life without shame or inhibition, which is a necessary and desirable outcome of liberating social movements. It does not mean, however, that a person’s heteroclite sexual choices permit him or her to enter the Constitution or the sacraments, that is, into state-sanctioned formal arrangements.
The individual’s sexual orientation and erotic preferences, as such, have nothing to do with the state, any more than his or her appetites, tastes, reveries, longings, or dreams can be legislated or licensed. Given the virtues of limited government and the proviso of non-interference in the private and intimate life of its citizens, the state’s proper objective is to ensure the security and survival of the society which it serves.
In this regard, upholding the institution of marriage is critical. If, for example, we lived in a Hollywood/Arnold Schwarzenegger world, as in the film Junior, in which a man could bear a child, there would be no scruple over waiving the legal impediments to same-sex marriage. Regrettably, this is not the case, transgender Thomas Beatie, a.k.a. Tracy Lagondino, notwithstanding. Beatie, after all, assuming his much-publicized claim to pregnancy is not a hoax, did not have his reproductive organs surgically altered.
Same-sex marriage is quite literally a no-brainer. Predicated on the disintegration of a fundamental structure of social and civilizational viability and the desertification of the womb, it’s only function is to deplete society of a sustainable future while catering to the whims and “needs” of what we might call the “group individual.” All this under the sign of “progressivism,” a doctrine that has espoused the ideology of identity politics in which group membership trumps both the autonomous individual and the larger social contract.
Same-sex marriage is both a cause and an effect of the pervasive narcissism and acedia that is coming more and more to characterize the therapeutic world we live in — a world in which the state replaces the community, recreational sex is promoted at the expense of procreational sex, an improvisatory legalism does duty for traditional morality, the underdog has been rebadged as the overlord, and the group individual rejoices in the grievances which empower him.....
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