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Greenfield: The Deconstruction of Marriage
Sultan Knish blog ^ | Wednesday, April 15, 2015 | Daniel Greenfield

Posted on 04/15/2015 4:58:04 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

The Deconstruction of Marriage

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution.

Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the
deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed.

The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family is a flickering light in the evening of the West.

The deconstruction is destruction. Entire countries are fading away, their populations being replaced by emigrants from more traditional lands whose understanding of the male-female relationship is positively reactionary. These emigrants may lack technology or the virtues of civilization, and their idea of marriage resembles slavery more than any modern ideal, but it fulfills the minimum purpose of any group, tribe or country-- it produces its next generation.

The deconstruction of marriage is not a mere matter of front page photos of men kissing. It began with the deconstruction of the family. Gay marriage is only one small stop on a tour that includes rising divorce rates, falling childbirth rates and the abandonment of responsibility by twenty and even thirty-somethings.

Each step on the tour takes apart the definition and structure of marriage until there is nothing left. Gay marriage is not inclusive, it is yet another attempt at eliminating marriage as a social institution by deconstructing it until it no longer exists.

There are two ways to destroy a thing. You can either run it at while swinging a hammer with both hands or you can attack its structure until it no longer means anything.

The left hasn't gone all out by outlawing marriage, instead it has deconstructed it, taking apart each of its assumptions, from the economic to the cooperative to the emotional to the social, until it no longer means anything at all. Until there is no way to distinguish marriage from a temporary liaison between members of uncertain sexes for reasons that due to their vagueness cannot be held to have any solemn and meaningful purpose.

You can abolish democracy by banning the vote or you can do it by letting people vote as many times as they want, by letting small children and foreigners vote, until no one sees the point in counting the votes or taking the process seriously. The same goes for marriage or any other institution. You can destroy it by outlawing it or by eliminating its meaningfulness until it becomes so open that it is absurd.

Every aspect of marriage is deconstructed and then eliminated until it no longer means anything. And once marriage is no longer a lifetime commitment between a man and a woman, but a ceremony with no deeper meaning than most modern ceremonies, then the deconstruction and destruction will be complete.

The deconstruction of marriage eroded it as an enduring institution and then as an exclusive institution and finally as a meaningful institution. The trendy folk who claim to be holding off on getting married until gay marriage is enacted are not eager for marriage equality, they are using it as an excuse for an ongoing rejection of marriage.

Gay marriage was never the issue. It was always marriage.

In the world that the deconstructionists are striving to build, there will be marriage, but it will mean nothing. Like a greeting card holiday, it will be an event, but not an institution. An old ritual with no further meaning. An egotistical exercise in attention-seeking and self-celebration with no deeper purpose. It will be a display every bit as hollow as the churches and synagogues it takes place in.

The deconstruction of marriage is only a subset of the deconstruction of gender from a state of being to a state of mind. The decline of marriage was preceded by the deconstruction of gender roles and gay marriage is being succeeded by the destruction of gender as anything other than a voluntary identity, a costume that one puts on and takes off.

Destroying gender roles was a prerequisite to destroying gender. Each deconstruction leads naturally to the next deconstruction with no final destination except total deconstruction.

Gay marriage is not a stopping point, just as men in women's clothing using the ladies room is not a stopping point. There is no stopping point at all.

The left's deconstruction of social institutions is not a quest for equality, but for destruction. As long as the institutions that preceded it exist, it will go on deconstructing them until there is nothing left but a blank canvas, an unthinking anarchy, on which it can impose its perfect and ideal conception of how everyone should live.

Equality is merely a pretext for deconstruction. Change the parameters of a thing and it ceases to function. Redefine it and expand it and it no longer means anything at all. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but if you change 'rose' to mean anything that sticks out of the ground, then the entire notion of what is being discussed has gone and cannot be reclaimed without also reclaiming language.

The left's social deconstruction program is a war of ideas and concepts. Claims of equality are used to expand institutions and ways of living until they are so broad as to encompass everything and nothing. And once a thing encompasses everything, once a rose represents everything rising out of the ground, then it also represents nothing at all.

Deconstruction is a war against definitions, borders and parameters. It is a war against defining things by criminalizing the limitation of definitions. With inclusivity as the mandate, exclusivity, in marriage, or any other realm, quickly meets with social disapproval and then becomes a hate crime. If the social good is achieved only through maximum inclusivity and infinite tolerance, then any form of exclusivity, from property to person to ideas, is a selfish act that refuses the collective impulse to make all things into a common property with no lasting meaning or value.

As Orwell understood in 1984, tyranny is essentially about definitions. It is hard to fight for freedom if you lack the word. It is hard to maintain a marriage if the idea no longer exists. Orwell's Oceania made basic human ideas into contradictory things. The left's deconstruction of social values does the same thing to such essential institutions as marriage; which becomes an important impermanent thing of no fixed nature or value.

The left's greatest trick is making things mean the opposite of what they do. Stealing is sharing. Crime is justice. Property is theft. Each deconstruction is accompanied by an inversion so that a thing, once examined, comes to seem the opposite of what it is, and once that is done, it no longer has the old innate value, but a new enlightened one.

To deconstruct man, you deconstruct his beliefs and then his way of living. You deconstruct freedom until it means slavery. You deconstruct peace until it means war. You deconstruct property until it means theft. And you deconstruct marriage until it means a physical relationship between any group of people for any duration. And that is the opposite of what marriage is.

The deconstruction of marriage is part of the deconstruction of gender and family and those are part
of the long program of deconstructing man. Once each basic value has been rendered null and void, inverted and revealed to be random and meaningless, then man is likewise revealed to be a random and meaningless creature whose existence requires shaping by those who know better.

The final deconstruction eliminates nation, religion, family and even gender to reduce the soul of man to a blank slate waiting to be written on.

That is what is at stake here. This is not a struggle about the right of equality, but the right of definition. It is not about whether men can get married, but whether marriage will mean anything at all. It is about preserving the shapes and structures of basic social concepts that define our identities in order to preserve those very concepts, rather than accepting their deconstruction into nullification.

The question on the table is whether the institutions that give us meaning will be allowed to retain that meaning. And that question is a matter of survival. Societies cannot survive without definitions. Peoples do not go on existing through the act of occupying space. The deconstruction of identity is also the destruction of people.

And that is what we are truly fighting against.


TOPICS: Government; History; Politics; Religion
KEYWORDS: greenfield; homosexualagenda; sultanknish
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FReepmail or drop me a comment to get on or off the Sultan Knish ping list. I highly recommend an occasional look at the Sultan Knish blog. It is a rich source of materials, links and more from one of the preeminent writers of our age.

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Lou

1 posted on 04/15/2015 4:58:04 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell
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To: daisy mae for the usa; AdvisorB; wizardoz; free-in-nyc; Vendome; Georgia Girl 2; blaveda; ...

Now that HG is gone we have no one to remind us about double posting. I guess it falls to me to do the dirty deed.

This article was first posted March 28, 2013 by expat1000. It has been updated and reposted on the Knish blog. Now, more than ever, we should acknowledge the vital importance of traditional marriage.

2 posted on 04/15/2015 5:01:46 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

I don’t care if someone posts this 10 times, and I don’t understand why anyone else cares either. You can’t post the truth too many times for me.


3 posted on 04/15/2015 5:06:19 PM PDT by stephenjohnbanker (My Batting Average( 1,000) (GOPe is that easy to read))
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To: Louis Foxwell; humblegunner

What do you mean “gone”?


4 posted on 04/15/2015 5:06:20 PM PDT by Freedom_Fighter_2001
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To: Freedom_Fighter_2001

Gone as in ZAPPED!
At least as of last week.


5 posted on 04/15/2015 5:09:06 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

I don’t usually criticize Daniel, but in this piece, he makes the fundamental error of conflating “sex” and “gender.” It is our sex - male or female - that is biologically fundamental. “Gender” is a social construction (or a grammatical formality).


6 posted on 04/15/2015 5:12:53 PM PDT by Tax-chick (I'm a radical feminist. Galatians 3:28)
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To: Louis Foxwell
The final deconstruction eliminates nation, religion, family and even gender to reduce the soul of man to a blank slate waiting to be written on.

This is what I have been screaming from the rooftops but even many on our side don't understand what the endgame truly is.

7 posted on 04/15/2015 5:13:30 PM PDT by relictele (Principiis obsta & Finem respice - Resist The Beginnings & Consider The Ends)
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To: Louis Foxwell; humblegunner

Nope, you’ve been fooled by his page. You can see his posts this week by clicking “in forum” if you are a fan.


8 posted on 04/15/2015 5:14:07 PM PDT by Freedom_Fighter_2001
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To: Louis Foxwell

OOPS! Suspension for the HG seems to have lasted little more than a day. Wait for it....


9 posted on 04/15/2015 5:14:10 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

FWIW, this bears repeating, even if it is old. The hard fact is that America is running itself into the ground with indefinite deficits, hopeless romance with the 1990s, reduction in military, and then reducing to nothing the definition of marriage. Marriage means about nothing nowadays, there’s a reason why people simply shack up, especially in Europe, being married doesn’t mean much, nor does it have true tangible benefit, and you can easily acquire plenty of what one would associate marriage with without being married. Recently, I mentioned about a kid on the way, and someone assumed it was my girlfriend who was, and not my wife as it actually was. If people are assuming this much, society really is in trouble.


10 posted on 04/15/2015 5:14:18 PM PDT by Morpheus2009
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To: Tax-chick

I believe that is his point.


11 posted on 04/15/2015 5:14:48 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
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To: Tax-chick

Good point.


12 posted on 04/15/2015 5:18:21 PM PDT by stephenjohnbanker (My Batting Average( 1,000) (GOPe is that easy to read))
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To: Louis Foxwell

Do you mean Hum-—gun-—? His profile page says his account has been banned or suspended, but he has posted dozens of times in the last few days.

How does that happen?


13 posted on 04/15/2015 5:21:04 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o ("I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus: the power of God who brings salvation to all who believe.")
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To: Louis Foxwell

Wow, didn’t know HG was zapped.


14 posted on 04/15/2015 5:21:45 PM PDT by Engedi
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To: stephenjohnbanker

This is first time I ever read this, it explains so much about what is going on and why and what exactly is at stake.

I came across an article last week that said the reason the left/Democrats are so gung ho for gay marriage and abortions is because its a means for population control.


15 posted on 04/15/2015 5:24:28 PM PDT by Engedi
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To: Louis Foxwell
Gay marriage is not a stopping point, just as men in women's clothing using the ladies room is not a stopping point. There is no stopping point at all.

This is the money quote. I have said on numerous occasions here that the fatal flaw of "progressivism" is that with it, as with cancer, there is no "stop" mechanism which tells it that enough is enough. Indeed, progressives seeking the perfect ant hill, will push every issue beyond its limits until they kill the host.

16 posted on 04/15/2015 5:24:50 PM PDT by hinckley buzzard
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To: Engedi

The day of the previous Knish post HG was “suspended of banned” according to a mod notation. I do not think he could fake that. Apparently it was a very short duration suspension. His posts since then have been devoid of personal slander. Maybe he got the message.


17 posted on 04/15/2015 5:32:01 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
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To: Engedi

Population control is a factor to some leftists, but this is to destroy the family,and religion, and leave homosexuals blameless in public for their evil lifestyle.


18 posted on 04/15/2015 5:34:51 PM PDT by stephenjohnbanker (My Batting Average( 1,000) (GOPe is that easy to read))
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To: Louis Foxwell; stephenjohnbanker; Mrs. Don-o
No, I think he's series. He couldn't have written this, otherwise: Destroying gender roles was a prerequisite to destroying gender.

He's saying "gender" exists independently of "gender roles." He's got it wrong. Sex exists independently of roles. Outside the context of grammar, "gender" is nothing but roles: it's how a society expects people of different sexes to act.

To the extent that "sex roles" exist, they are strictly reproductive. Men inseminate. Women are impregnated, they gestate, they deliver babies, and they lactate. Beyond that, for just about any verb that you wanted to tack onto the subject "Men" or "Women" ... that is, "gender roles" ... you can find an exception in living or historical anthropology.

19 posted on 04/15/2015 5:38:48 PM PDT by Tax-chick (I'm a radical feminist. Galatians 3:28)
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To: Louis Foxwell

HG is never gone. He put that on his page himself. It’s just part of his ******* nature.


20 posted on 04/15/2015 5:39:14 PM PDT by Excellence (Marine mom since April 11, 2014)
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