Marriage on the rocks

In modern journalism, radical change is often announced by a yawn-inducing headline. For instance, "Legal Group Urges States to Update Their Family Law" (New York Times, November 29). The headline, one step up from "Don't Bother to Read This," refers to a ponderous 1,200-page commentary and set of recommendations by the American Law Institute, a group of prominent judges and lawyers. The proposals, "Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution," may seem like dry, technical suggestions about custody, alimony, and property distribution. But what this "update" really amounts to is a devastating legal assault on marriage.

The institute report says that in many important ways, domestic partnerships should be legally treated like marriage. It defines domestic partners as "two persons of the same or opposite sex, not married to one another, who for a significant period of time share a primary residence and a life together as a couple." When breaking up, the report says, cohabitants are entitled to a division of property and alimonylike payments, just like married people who divorce. And after a relationship ends, the cohabiting partner of a legal parent may share custody and decision-making responsibility for the legal parent's child.

The report validates homosexual relationships and gives them a status comparable to that of marriage. If accepted, this idea would lead immediately to the next legal argument: If gay and straight commitments have the same status in state law, isn't it picky and discriminatory to withhold the word marriage from the gay version? Heterosexual couples who live together would also get the same status as husbands and wives, blurring or eliminating another line between marriage and serial affairs.

War on tradition. The most drastic notion embedded in the suggestions is that marriage is just one arrangement among many. Marriage is being deconstructed here, downgraded and privatized. It is no longer the crucial building block of the social order and makes no special contribution to civil society that justifies any distinctive honor or status. This report, says Lynn Wardle, professor of law at Brigham Young University, "continues the war on the traditional family and traditional sexual morality that has been waged for over three decades."

Wardle has a point. Marriage is in trouble for a lot of reasons, but surely one important factor is the relentless hostility unleashed by the 1960s counterculture, which portrayed marriage as oppressive, patriarchal, outmoded, and destructive to children. The attitudes of today's elites reflect that never-ending campaign. Now we have lots of "marriage" counselors who never use the word marriage and textbooks on families bristling with hostility to the nuclear family. As I wrote in this space several years ago, "One of the problems in trying to shore up the institution of marriage is that so many of the professionals who teach and write about it-counselors, therapists, academics, and popular authors-really don't support marriage at all."

What they do tend to support is known as "close relationship theory," the idea that sexual and emotional satisfaction comes from intense, fragile, and often short-term relationships that aren't necessarily going anywhere. One advocate calls them "microwave relationships," cooked up fast, served, and consumed, presumably with other similar meals to come. It all seems like the dream world of a randy adolescent chasing cheerleaders. Marriage is knocked off its pedestal, and the family itself fades away. Children tend to fade away, too, in close-relationship theory, as emphasis comes down hard on adult fulfillment.

Let's take a broad meat-axe to your entire convoluted post, and cut to the marrow:

The State is People. Human beings.

No one is more cognizant than I that our present government is an evil enterprise instilling its Culture of Death at home and abroad to the tune of millions dead and untold millions of lives PREVENTED each year.

Be that as it may ...

Nations and states still are people and it's people -- especially those who listen to their consciences -- that understand and are perfectly capable of upholding, if not always themselves remaining obedient to, the Natural Moral Law.

Further, it is a scientific fact of sorts that -- absent electricity or some other technological assist -- that Survival of the Fittest as part of Evolution theory mandates the conception of children ONLY by the one Man and the one Woman and, further, strongly suggests that the optimum arrangement for Man, Woman AND CHILD is the patriarchal family enjoying the same division of labor between male and female that is written into the first cell of every human being ever born on the face of this earth.

Yes, Virginia ... I do indeed believe the State is not only capable of recognizing these facts but obligated to defend them in light of a JUST State's interest in ensuring freedom and justice for all its citizenry.

You -- like some of our Libertarian or self-styled "anarchist" friends -- are simply too caught up in this Evil State crap to think logically and dispassionately about the issue.

This is particularly absurd for others (if not you and your Biblical meat cleaver) given the fact that they're perpetually hearkening to the Self-Evident truths embodied in our Declaration as founding document when rightfully moaning about the excesses and evils of our present government. It's as if they wish to eat their pie and throw it too.

Individuals may strictly obligate themselves as they see fit when marrying (as do some Catholics) or employ the gamut of Personal Values when confecting an "open" or same-sex or group marriage ... or even marrying one's pet or an urn of ashes. Basically, anything goes.

In order to preserve the foundation of a just society with specific legal protections due every life -- particularly the innocent children the product of Perfectly Natural sexual relations one assumes is part of marriage -- the State is OBLIGATED to recognize and protect as sovereign the institution of marriage.

What's really absurd is that you appear on the defensive almost. As if I had some hope in hell of our nation's actually preserving the institution of marriage as strictly that between Man and Wife.

Don't kid yourself.

Our government's too far gone for that. Instead, we'll be employing the same spirit of Sensitivity, Diversity and non-Discrimination that Bush is using to schlep his (and Gore's) "faith-based partnerships" initiatives.

All rather silly, actually ... especially for a nation whose President has already sanctioned the use of "Excess" manufactured human lives for research and appointed a pro-human cloning director of the NIH whose budget he doubled.

You'll get your way, don't worry OP. Everyone will be entitled to their own atomistic definition of marriage (homosexuality equal to heterosexuality; blessed equal to strictly secular; sterile equal to fruitful; casual equal to formal) and the State will be only too happy to obliterate the Universal Reality and enduring ideal to which most aspire in their hearts and by which individuals, their families and their nations prosper, grow strong and are able to defend themselves against the encroachments of others and the State.

Obviously....very obviously....we do NOT in this PRESENT TIME have anything approaching a just state.

Definitely a big problem.

I'm still not going to change my view that ALL states are ALWAYS evil. I don't believe that's the case.

No question but what if we'd always interpreted the Constitution in light of the Declaration, we'd be a sight more just than we are today.

The State and the Soul

Dom Huber van Zeller, O.S.B.

We Work While the Light Lasts, (Sheed & Ward 1950; Image, 1962)

What we tend to forget is that States are people. States are not houses of parliament or legislative measures or international congresses; they are human souls with a plan., Often the plan is the wrong one, and often the human souls are concerned more with material than spiritual ends, but so far as final purpose goes, the State's is the same as that of the individual and of the family.

The ideal State is the large-scale family; the family is people. People come before the States. States derive their original and their authority through the people whom the rule -- and so through families. The right to rule is from God -- but it comes through people. The first society is the family, not the State. The family is the perfect society in miniature; the State is (at best) the perfect family magnified. If every family were self-dependent, there would be no State: there would only be country m or town or district. But because families, in order to exist and develop, have to come to one another's assistance there have to be States.

The State is therefore the consequence, not the cause, of man's social nature. But, as so often happens in the affairs of mankind, the effect tends to develop at the expense of the cause: the State gradually begins to assume the rights of the family, overruling its original authority and even, sometimes, turning against its original purpose. So soon as a State proposes some end of its own, neglecting the well-being of its constituent elements or not listening to their claims in self-development, it reverses God's purpose and is unworthy of governing. This rules out Totalitarian States at once.

Thus, if States go wrong, morally, when they pursue a policy which is independent of the persons in it, statesmen go wrong, morally, when the subscribe to the party, programme overriding the individual need. That men in responsible positions should do this must sound very wicked indeed. Yet they are doing it every day -- in so-called Christian countries.

With their eyes open, but seeing only the good of the whole or fulfillment of the theory, statesmen and politicians are waiving away the inalienable rights of the single unit. This may seem very wicked but it should hardly seem very surprising: where no search is made for what is outside the present life, it is the inevitable consequence. Where the supernatural destiny of mankind is ignored, the natural rights which were designed toward the attainment of this end find no support.

Politics are intended to be the means of realising ethical principles. Such, anyway, was the original plan. Politics are meant to open the door to what theology and philosophy decide upon as a code of right behaviour. "This is the good life," says the thinker; "it leads to happiness and to God." "Very well," says the politician, "we must adopt it and extend it for the benefit of all." The assumption here is that the thinker is a Christian moralist, and the politician is an honest man. It is a bold assumption.

That politics have gone off the Christian standard is all to evident. In fact, having slid away from the ethics of the Gospel, politics now excuse themselves from observing any sort of ethics at all. At one time morality was not a private duty as it is now: it was a public standard. Public and private affairs were integrated; there was a unity. Today there is no such reflex check-up: whatever people do in their own houses as regards social relations is their affair; politics, whether national or international, are run on a basis of expediency.

Religion, for example, may not enter into the questions of public policy. "It isn't the slightest use applying evangelical principles in our dealings with those who are opposed to us," says the politician, "we wouldn't be understood." And the awful part of it is that this is true. Once one side refuses to play, all the others begin to cheat. What used to be at least a recognition of the spiritual realities has been replaced by exclusively material considerations. The only things which count for anything in international relations are power and threat and bribe. The idea of trust between nations is laughable.⁽¹⁾

Children growing up in the modern world may be excused if they imagine that patriotism's finest expression is the savage bravery of the hater. For them diplomacy is nothing more than the ability to outwit an opposite number by underhand means. Eventually it must come to this, that a nation's well-being is assessed by the degree to which it has been able to eliminate its rivals, whether in trade or in the field. It is the ugly story of the master race, the Herrenvolk.

In a world where peace is maintained only by balance of fear, where finance takes sharp practice for granted, where ideals in matters of sex are looked upon as a survival from the mistaken ages of piety, there is little room for the Christian conscience. No account is taken of the soul who is disgusted by the non-Christian and amoral evidences which appear in contemporary legislation, in art and literature, in the tolerance extended to such things as nudism and its literature, to salacious films, to plays and even broadcasts which are not only tendentious but positively subversive.

How -- to return again to the family which is after all the heart of the matter -- can young people learn to take their place in society if the idea of government looms larger than the idea of father and mother, if laws are conceived of as disciplines to be evaded, if money is taken as the final end and test of success, if happiness is identified with pleasures which can be bought, if love is seen as a thing of the senses, if religion is judged to be a suitable interest for those who have a taste for it? The way of life which modern civilisation has adopted makes no allowance for the yearning of the soul. How can it? By relegating it to the sacristy, it has virtually denied the existence of the soul.

Politics cannot be held entirely responsible -- any more than the cinema or the economic state of mankind or the two wars can be held responsible -- for the alienation of man from his spiritual inheritance, but it is indisputable that if politics took Christianity as a basis there would be a return to natural relations between societies, classes and peoples. In order to achieve this return, governments would have to plan in a Christian way, would have to think Christianity, would eve have to practice it in their private lives. Governments, again, are individuals. Governments are -- let us face it -- ourselves.

The State is our concern as much as it is the concern of politicians. If in the Body of Christ one member must supply what the other lacks, then we so-called religious people must pray our way, Christ's way, into the parliaments of the world. This does not necessarily mean that religiously minded men and women must force themselves to take an interest in politics: it means that politically-minded men and women -- indeed all men and women -- must force themselves to take an interest in religion.

⁽¹⁾ Yet the present Pope has been insisting that nations cannot hope to solve their problems until they being to trust one another.

Some lagniappe …

As with Nations, So with People
What happens to a country in a century may happen to an individual in less than a decade. Without ever going to the length of formal apostasy, a many may, every bit as fatally as a nation, allow false standards to replace true ones. Often the process of deterioration is exactly the same as that observed in the case of the State: material cares crowd out the needs of the spirit, quick returns are demanded without regard to ultimate ends.
In some cases, while the life of the soul is being whittled down to nothing at all, there is no great sense of guilt or loss. Gradual substitutions evoke no emotion either way -- there is neither remorse nor self-congratulation. As in the case of the nation, the individual wakes up to find himself pagan -- and then goes to sleep again.
In those periods of history when States have gone pagan there was all the more need for individual members of them to go spiritual. There is exactly this need today. How else, except by the sanctifying of the parts, can spiritual health be restored to the whole? The parts must know where they stand as regards such fundamentals as religion and happiness before the whole, as represented by government, can be brought to recognise their claims. […]

The State is People. Human beings. No one is more cognizant than I that our present government is an evil enterprise instilling its Culture of Death at home and abroad to the tune of millions dead and untold millions of lives PREVENTED each year. Be that as it may ...

"Prevented"?? Killed would be a bit more true to the matter.

Be that as it may....

The Natural Moral Law for the State is that it exercises NO AUTHORITY WHATSOEVER over the "definition" and "certification" of Marriage.

If the State DOES enjoy a natural prerogative over the definition and certification of Marriage, then Abram and Sarai's Marriage (who sought no "approval of Caesar") was in some sense illegitimate for the absence of State Approval.
If the State DOES NOT enjoy a natural prerogative over the definition and certification of Marriage, then ALL "christians" who advocate the whoring of the Institution of Marriage to the prerogative of the State are State-worshipping Idolaters.

Why on earth are you bringing up "evolution theory"??

I couldn't give a tinker's damn about the Apostate Roman "church"s whoredoms with "evolution theory".

I am an Orthodox Calvinist.

My Church is headed by a Biblically valid Supreme Pontiff... unlike Rome.
My Church possesses a Biblically valid Apostolic Presbytery... unlike Rome.
My Church enjoys the fruits of a Biblically valid Teaching Magisterium... unlike Rome.

Why are you even bothering me with Apostate Rome's whorish compromises with "evolution theory"? As I am a Communicant Member of the Biblically legitimate Church of Jesus Christ, you should know full well that I am under NO Christian obligation to admit the Errors of Fallen Rome in this regard, so why even raise the argument?

If the State cannot recognize that it possesses NO natural authority to "define" or "certify" Marriage in any way whatsoever, then it is a Moloch-State which is at War against the Natural Law.

You -- like some of our Libertarian or self-styled "anarchist" friends -- are simply too caught up in this Evil State crap to think logically and dispassionately about the issue.

You -- like so many of our Neo-Conservative enemies -- are simply too caught up in this God-State crap to think Biblically and Morally about the issue.

And of course, when the State provides absolute legal protection for Private Contracts, then the State is duty-bound to provide absolute legal protection for those Contracts which are defined (by the Right of the Church ALONE) as constituting "Christian Marriages".

But at the point that Caesar claims the "right" to define and certify what constitutes a "Marriage", then the Institution of Marriage has become Caesar's Whore.

AND YOU, ASKEL5, CELEBRATE THIS SPIRITUAL PROSTITUTION.
AND THEREBY YOU ARE BECOME A CHEERLEADER FOR ALL THE SECULARLY-TRANSMITTED-DISEASES WHICH INFECT THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE AS A RESULT.

What's really absurd is that you appear on the defensive almost. As if I had some hope in hell of our nation's actually preserving the institution of marriage as strictly that between Man and Wife. Don't kid yourself. Our government's too far gone for that. Instead, we'll be employing the same spirit of Sensitivity, Diversity and non-Discrimination that Bush is using to schlep his (and Gore's) "faith-based partnerships" initiatives. All rather silly, actually ... especially for a nation whose President has already sanctioned the use of "Excess" manufactured human lives for research and appointed a pro-human cloning director of the NIH whose budget he doubled.

You don't have a "hope in hell" of preserving the institution of marriage, Askel5, because you have already assumed that the Church should whore out the definition and certification of Marriage to the fornications of the State.

At this point, you've already resolved yourself to advocate the Spiritual Adulteration of Marriage; you just think that maybe Caesar will consent to wear a "defense of marriage amendment" prophylactic -- if you ask him real nice.

I don't expect to get "my way". MY way would permanently remove from Caesar the power to "obliterate" Marriage, by permanently removing from Caesar the Right to "define" or "certify" Marriage.

If I were to have MY way, then AN-ARCH-IST (which being translated means, NOT-STATE-DICTATED) Biblical Marriages like Abram and Sarai's (the only Biblical sort of Marriage, after all) would thrive; while the Lavender Brigade, not having a State Certification to wave in Jerry Falwell's face (just a "private contract" which the Church has no Legal Obligation to recognize) would be left out in the cold, to sulk.

I don't "expect" to get "my way".

But it's MY WAY or the HIGHWAY, baby.

Either the Church will wrest away from Caesar his wholly-illegitimate usurpations over the definition and certification of Marriage, or the Church will ultimately be forced to consent to Caesar's whims thereupon.

As long as you consent (and what is more, to advocate) that the Church should whore out the definition and certification of Marriage unto Caesar, the best that you can hope for is a "defense of marriage amendment" prophylactic while Caesar continues to Rape the Institution.

And even that won't last. Caesar is a Beast, and once She is prostituted to his whims, the Institution of Marriage will suffer his "rough trade" soon enough.

And for your endorsement of the spiritual prostitution of the Institution of Marriage to the fornications, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

Because it will be YOUR FAULT... for whoring Marriage unto Caesar, and thereby making War against the Law of God.

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