Mourning Marriage

Mourning Marriage
By William Gairdner
http://www.williamgairdner.com/journal/

Life has gotten in the way of blogging lately. But on an occasional basis, I am back at it. For some reason the weirdness of Canada's enthusiastic embrace of gay marriage has stuck in my craw, and so I got warmed up by trying to write something brief about it. But the topic is so galling I failed miserably at keeping it short, and have ended up with about eight pages. I can only respond to the advice that blogs should be short by saying readers can make them as short as they wish by reading longer ones such as this in pieces, a bit each day, if desired.

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Alas, I, like many others, have grown tired of this topic. But moral fatigue is no excuse for capitulation on principles. Civilization is like a spider's web; delicate in the making, difficult to sustain, easy to destroy. It does not arise naturally, but is always the result of human will. But if the will becomes weak, if we drift, then the direction is always downward. Thus do all concerned citizens have a moral duty to oppose anything that undermines the common good of civilization. Edmund Burke got it so right when he said that the main reason for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. He did not say, as we might suppose, that good men have to do bad things. If they just do nothing, the bad will soon take over. That is the reason for the downward direction of a civilization that drifts. Battered though it has been by easy divorce and common-law laxities, traditional marriage - the only human institution the sole aim of which is to ensure there is a loving mother and father in as many homes as possible - has been the best thing for the vast majority of the kids on this planet since time began. Marriage, and the family that is its natural consequence are institutions that have preceded in existence, legitimacy, and prestige all rulers, all courts, and all states.

But in substituting the term "union of two-persons" for "union of a man and a woman," Canada has removed the natural biological and procreative foundation from marriage, leaving behind an eviscerated and merely legal definition - bereft of biology, bereft of what is humanly natural, bereft of custom, and bereft of any primordial concern for children. In doing so, our political leaders and courts - in sharp contrast to our neighbours to the south, where to date some 28 states have passed laws outlawing gay marriage - have once again taken the easy way out by declining to protest and end one of the most foolhardy social experiments the world has ever seen.



Same-Sex "Marriage" Is Not a Right

To add shame to the sham, Stephane Dion, the new leader of the Liberal party has tried to stir us into a fit of moral indignation by insisting that same-sex marriage is "a fundamental right" under Canada's Charter. But that is a distortion of the truth by an otherwise decent-seeming man. All things connected with homosexuality were roundly discussed and deliberately excluded from Canada's Charter by its framers prior to 1982. But it didn't take long for judges (who are responsible to no one) simply to decide (against the expressed wishes of the Canadian people, who have never given majority approval to gay marriage) that homosexuality, and same-sex marriage are practices they wanted to include under the "equality" provisions of Section 15 of the Charter, where none of this is mentioned. And Dion knows this. He also knows that there is no existing human-rights treaty with Canada that recognizes any such rights. Indeed, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically names the family as the "natural and fundamental group unit of society," as does the European Convention of Rights where marriage is specifically defined as a union of a man and a woman. The German Basic Law of 1949 also gives pre-eminent right to the family and preference in law to the raising of children by their own biological parents. In this spirit, France has just recently repudiated gay marriage entirely on the ground that children thrive best with the love and support of their own parents, and should never have same-sex parenting thrust upon them as a matter of state policy merely to satisfy the homosexual desires of adults. The French have insisted that wherever possible, the primordial natural right of children to know and be raised by their own biological parents must trump all adult rights.



Same-Sex Persons Cannot "Unite" in "Conjugality"

To avoid an anticipated public abuse of the state of marriage and a rush for merely financial and legal benefits by "any two persons," courts have ruled that these new unions must be "conjugal." Well now, "conjugal" comes from the root word "to join," and any two persons can say they have a conjugal union. But leaving aside the question that ought to embarrass this nation as to whether or not two penises or two vaginas can ever be "joined" in "union;" and leaving aside also a fact that is so obvious to any biologist that only human beings of opposite genders can have a "sexual" relation in any strict sense of that word; we are now in a position to ask a merely administrative question. Namely: in order to qualify for Canada's considerable legal and economic marital benefits, must two persons have sexual relations (or mock sexual relations, as in the case of homosexuals) to be considered married? If the answer is "No," then what kind of "union" is "a union of any two persons"? And if the answer is "Yes", then how is a state responsible for handing out benefits to married couples to know that any two persons claiming these benefits are actually living "conjugally"? Will we now have conjugality police to ensure "married" couples qualify? Not likely. So then, practically speaking, why does conjugality matter? After all, there are many older heterosexual couples who no longer "have sex," as that depressingly utilitarian saying goes. Point being: if we cannot prove, or disprove conjugality, how then can it be the state's test-condition to receive the benefits accruing to the act of marriage? And if it is not a good test, then other than the traditional requirement of heterosexuality as a presumptive condition for marriage and its benefits, what is?



We Should Not Promote What Is Unnatural As Desirable

If this matter pertained only to individuals, I would say, who cares? Acting within the law, we ought to be able to live with whomsoever we wish, and to be left alone. But this in turn means the state, its courts and tribunals, should not be using the law to intimidate or to force me, my children, my friends, or my society at large to agree that what other people do to excite themselves with those of their own sex is normal, or natural, if we sincerely believe otherwise. If someone chooses to "marry" a partner with whom he or she will by definition and design barred from true sexual union and barren forever of children I should not be pressured or obliged to agree that this is a good idea for those persons, or for my country. For I do not. I accept that some individuals may prefer such a life, and may think that it is good for them. But no amount of logic or argument can convince a reasonable person that it is good for society as a whole, for the common good, or for the continuation of civilization. I may think homosexuality is weird, sad, unnatural, a sexual neurosis, a disorder of the soul, whatever. But I still say - tenuously, and with much circumspection - live and let live. Well, Bill, I am told - there have always been some childless hetero couples. What's the difference? Of course, I answer. There are some by choice, some too old, and some who live with the deep sadness of infertility. But a society that has intentionally privileged human partnerships that are barren by definition and thus made them a legitimate and normative model for the young, with a social status and with benefits equal to those enjoyed by unions that conform to society's difficult procreative model, has entered a perilous course. I say "difficult," because raising fine, honest, well-mannered, civil human beings is perhaps the most selfless daily challenge that most of us will ever undertake, requiring extraordinary emotional, personal, and financial dedication and sacrifice. And that is why it is only these unions, with the customs, laws, and practices surrounding them that ought to enjoy the venerable status in human society that has until now been reserved only for true marriage (or its common-law equivalent, as distinct from the mock homosexual marriages we are being forced by law to accept as true). We have long ago accepted the fact that some people cannot or do not wish to row the lifeboat in which we are all passengers by contributing children who, as we age and weaken, grow up and row in their turn. We let them go along for the ride, so to speak. But it is perilous to the voyage of life to encourage such behaviour.



The Arguments for Same-sex Behaviour or Marriage are Weak

I have tried in vain to find a reasonable defense of homosexual behaviour and of same-sex marriage that speaks to the common good. But there just isn't one. There is simply no reasonable biological, social, evolutionary, or health defense of homosexual behaviour or same-sex marriage. Biologically, it is obviously a dead end. Socially, and in the sense that our moral behaviour may be judged according to how it legitimizes our actions for others, it is also a dead end, for we should not be setting up homosexuality, or homosexual marriage as an ideal for others. Neither can we use the genetic or the evolutionary argument to the effect that homosexuality provides some "survival value" for the human species, for the simple reason that homosexuals do not reproduce with each other. Indeed, any "gay-gene" argument works against its proponents, for a gay gene would lead to the extinction of gayness in a generation or two. (And spare us the "helper at the nest" argument - the idea that although they do not have their own kids, gays help with the raising of other people's kids, and therefore they do have a sort of species-survival value. This is a sweet, but ridiculous argument. And the only reason some male birds, for example, hang around to help the pair from which they have been rejected by the winning male, is in the hope of taking over next time around). Perhaps most dire of all, is the health question. If AIDS is any indicator, homo-sex remains one of the most life-threatening practices imaginable (Ottawa consistently tells us that over 80% of all AIDS deaths in Canada since the mid 1970s have been gay males). Culturally? Homosexuality has been discouraged by all civilizations in history apart from a few abnormal cliques or periods - one of which we are presently living through. And of course, anyone who reflects frankly on what it is that homosexuals actually do with each other for their sensual (again these cannot, by definition, be sexual) pleasures will conclude it is profoundly unnatural, just as any farmer who buys two bulls to service his herd of cows and wakes up to find them mounting each other would conclude there is something deeply wrong with them.



The Arguments Against Gay Marriage Are Strong

These can be summed in a paragraph or two. All human beings are born of a mother and begotten by a father, and the law and the state have always protected marriage - the mother-father-child relation - because this is the only natural means of creating human life and continuing civilization. Of high importance is the argument that marriage has always been a child-centered and not an adult-centered institution (until now, in Canada), and no one - no judge, no politician, and no state - has ever before claimed the right to redefine marriage so as intentionally to impose a fatherless or motherless home on a child as a matter of state policy. For until now, marriage has always rested on four conditions, like a four-legged chair, and compliance with all these conditions has been the trigger for marital benefits. These have to do with number, gender, age, and incest. We have always said you can only marry one person at a time, who must be someone of the opposite sex, someone above a certain age, and not a close blood relative. But the recent official removal of the opposite-gender condition has badly weakened this stable social structure. For if it now takes only two persons to make a marriage, then why not a man and a twelve-year old girl (breaking the age condition)? A brother and sister (breaking the close-relation condition)? What about three friends who want to marry just to cut their expenses (breaking the number condition)?

I know: marriage was already weakened by no-fault divorce and common-law. But that is no excuse for smashing it entirely. We just tore off one leg of the chair, and there are already legal attempts to tear off the other three. Indeed, in the middle of my writing this piece, the Ontario Court of Appeal decided that a child may have three parents! Leaving aside the argument that courts often have to appoint guardians or legal "parents" and that a child may need more than two protectors in some anomalous situations; that is quite different from setting up multiple parenthood as a desirable social precedent merely to accommodate homosexuals - which was the motive this time around. This decision opened the door to legalized polygamy, and soon our Charter will be used specifically for this purpose, and then to defend such things as "intergenerational sex" (a fancy term for pedophilia). And then we will see Charter rights to "marry" a sibling, and so on. Just wait. In 1990, people thought gay marriage was a ludicrous idea (let alone a right), and those who warned against it, such as this writer, were mocked as fear-mongers.



If a Policy Is "Equal" - It Cannot Be a Policy

One of the most common, but for sure among the weakest of arguments in support of gay marriage is the call for "equality." For a moment's reflection tells us that all genuine policies are intended to discriminate in a positive way in favour of some human arrangements, and not others. That is what makes a policy a policy, which is to say a program intentionally designed and targeted to achieve a specific social or economic result by encouraging some human behaviours and discouraging (vigorously discriminating against) others. However, if the test of a policy is that it must be "equal" for all then it disqualifies itself as a policy, for it has thereby lost the very thing essential to its particular goal or purpose - the targeted discrimination or preference for certain human actions that made it a policy in the first place. In short, if we eliminate the qualifications that made a policy effective we convert it into a hand-out for all which automatically loses its capacity to steer citizens one way rather than another.

Some examples of how ordinary policy distinctions discriminate beneficially for the common good are the welfare system, public awards, veteran rights, and elite athlete benefits. I am not necessarily supporting these programs. I am just arguing that if we give welfare benefits to everyone without qualification (having a very low income), they immediately lose their policy purpose as welfare rights. And if we give all Canadians the Order of Canada it loses all value as a public honour. And if we give veterans' benefits (let alone the Victoria Cross!) to all citizens, just to make them "equal" to veterans, those who have served their country as soldiers and earned these benefits and recognitions would be justifiably outraged. In the same way, we do not give stipends to ordinary athletes - only to those of the highest rank. The same logic applies to everyday privileges like special parking spaces for handicapped people and expectant mothers - you have to qualify for them.

Just so for marriage. It has always been the intent of state policy on marriage to encourage and privilege only unions that meet the four conditions or prohibitions concerning age, gender, number, and incest, and to value them higher than any other type of human partnership. Why? Simply because the state knows that if with the various benefits available you encourage enough men and women to unite sexually you will inevitably get a lot of babies. And everyone knows this will not be so if you reward girls for partnering with girls, or boys with boys.

At this point, people say - Bill, there only a few thousand gay marriages. What's the harm? The response is that you can ruin the value of the Victoria Cross by presenting it with full public support to a single coward, just as you can ruin the prestige of the Order of Canada by presenting it to one Canadian of zero achievement. In short, to remove the qualifications for a privilege is to remove the privilege.



Love Is No Argument for State Benefits

The state has - and ought to have - no business whatsoever involving itself as protector-adjudicator-benefactor of the private love-lives of citizens for any reason except for the fact that heterosexual marriages and the children we expect and hope they will produce - about 95% of them do so - are vital for the well-being of human society and so must be honoured and favoured above all other such love arrangements because they are the only ones with procreative potential.

At this point, homosexuals are outraged, as the fashionable expression goes, and start to protest that they love each other, too, and therefore are being deprived of an equal right. But I say, you love someone? So what? Love is an adequate reason for demanding attention from your partner, or even from friends and relatives if they are interested in your love. But it is not a compelling ground for demanding attention from the state, or from complete strangers (citizens and taxpayers), or for insisting that equal public respect or privileges or benefits be paid to support your love. For its own sake, love can be wonderful, as we all know. But it is a private matter, and all alone, for itself, even the most wonderful private love does not justify receiving public attention when by definition there is no hope of public benefit. And why should it? Love is the easy part; the fun part. But childrearing - the creation of productive and competent citizens - is very, very tough. And that is why the only justification for extending legal protection or economic benefits even to heterosexual unions is for the simple reason that society and the state have a high and justifiable expectation of getting something crucially important in return: more well-raised citizens. Without the reasonable expectation of this return on investment, so to speak, which follows with great regularity from the simple form of heterosexual marriage, no two people who love each other, regardless of their genders, should receive favours or protections extracted by law from anyone else. To put it bluntly: the only kind of law-abiding private love that should be of any public concern whatsoever, is the love that occurs between two people who choose to unite under the four conditions mentioned above.

And I hasten to add that in addition to diminishing the value of the institution of marriage we are also busily undoing a distinction our civilization has been at pains to teach us for a couple of thousand years between good love and bad love. For it is clear that human beings are capable of loving almost anything whatsoever, good or bad (just as they may hate almost anything). In order for them to love the good instead of the bad, however, the former must be publicly recognized and encouraged by all in morality and in law, and the latter as clearly discouraged. Traditionally, we discourage things like self-love in the narcissistic sense; and a crass love of money; and sexual love of children; and a love of doing hundreds of other bad things. Psychiatric manuals carry descriptions of many kinds of bad love, usually with the tag philia at the end of them (Greek for love), such as necrophilia. Until very recently, homosexual love was considered a form of bad love (and still is by many psychiatrists and citizens gutsy enough to say so), because it rests on two errors: the wrong love object, and the wrong organ, or orifice. And that plain truth cannot be changed by any number of judges or "equality" clauses. I mention these things just to say that "love" is a rather loaded term, and though it is our deepest emotion, it cannot reasonably be used to justify getting something just because we happen to feel love. Needless to say, in this context the suggestion is especially weak that a feeling of love qualifies us to lay a claim on other people's tax dollars in the form of social or economic benefits.



We Must Honour Even the Form of Natural Marriage

Okay, Bill. But what about infertile couples, or old people who marry but can no longer have children? Why should they have such rights? First of all, because they have met all four of the qualifying conditions for marriage with respect to number, gender, age, and incest. That is sufficient in itself. But I would add that they also deserve them simply because in choosing the traditional form of marital partnership they continue to honour and perpetuate the only form of human union that (again) can be a sexual union (has procreative potential) and thus the only kind that is absolutely essential to the preservation and continuation of civilization. Any other kind of relationship may be interesting, cute, compassionate, whatever. But from the point of view of the state it is unimportant. It is nobody's business, and therefore ought to be of no public concern. To repeat, citizens, simply in choosing a natural sexual union over any other form, publicly honour and acknowledged the high public value that is the foundation for this act and in so doing they teach this value. That is why traditional marriage, in practice and in its very form must be given a respect higher than that given to any other human partnership or friendship. A society that voluntarily generalizes, demystifies, desacralizes, or simply demotes this special form of human union by offering the same privileges to "any two persons" can expect to see this once vital institution further dishonoured and mocked as trivial.



The Role of the State in Marriage Demolition

Citizens must beware the insidious reputation of the modern state in relation to the special role, influence, and survival of the natural family. Empires, principalities, and states, however defined, have always had one thing in common: a natural antipathy to any other human organization or association within their jurisdiction that competes with the state for the loyalty of citizens. Principal among such associations have been religion and the family, the two social entities - the first spiritual, the second biological - to which people have always given a private allegiance more powerful than their public feeling for country or rulers.

This sort of tension was visible in ancient Rome, where the law of the family and the law of mighty Rome itself were often in conflict, the state as often giving way. Indeed, in many European nations, even today, no monarch or ruler, no matter how absolute the power has ever had the unfettered or capricious right to enter a private home without permission of the family. But the most insidious incursions of state power into family relations and property rights have been felt since the advent of the mighty tax-harvesting social-welfare states of modern times, many of which have declared an open or covert war against the private family, seeing it as a cradle of social privilege and inequality. Accordingly, they have specifically sought to weaken the natural biological bonds of marriage as the family's foundation. Marx and Engels based much of their disastrous communist social program on a deep distrust of the private family. That was socialism with machine guns. But the softer social-welfare states that arose in the 20th century - of which Sweden and Canada are the most ideologically fervent examples - have at their foundation the very same animus against the family and indeed against all biologically-based distinctions, privileges, or differences between citizens that might pose a threat to the only claim of such states to a quasi-moral authority: the guarantee of citizen equality in all things. Aware as they are that the family has a deep and powerful blood-grip on its members for life, such states take the softer, less visible approach. They weaken the grip of the family and its privileges not by eliminating the latter, but rather by dissolving their unique value and prestige by removing all qualifications for receiving them; that is, by showering them without discrimination on everyone alike. Just so, a deeply biologically-rooted institution such as marriage can be gradually transformed into yet another vehicle for political equalization. For this, citizens who have not seen what is really at work bow down and give thanks to the state

However, its seems to me that states that abandon all things spiritual and biological as the natural basis for civilization eventually find their official ideology reduced to a demoralizing and depressing concern for the mere material success and equality of all citizens. They are destined to founder through endlessly dispiriting wars over "rights". But equality, taken this far, is always a social and moral solvent because it is forced to take aim at all formerly useful social and moral distinctions and privileges. At such a point, the old idea of justice as embodied in what is natural and biological - with all the essential and necessary distinctions, glorious human differences, and essential social privileges this implies - will always lose in a war against the new idea of justice as . simply making everyone administratively equal by providing all without distinction with the same privileges and benefits (for which the only qualification will now be simple citizenship - and often not even that). In short, a fully developed egalitarian ideology must, by its own internal logic, oppose any and all natural human differences and distinctions that may threaten its only remaining, and very narrow claim to provide justice-as-equality for all. I say narrow, because even the ancient Greeks, for example, did not fall for simplistic idea that equality means justice. They did argue that one soldier must be treated like any other; and one general like another. But they never believed that a soldier and a general, a man and a boy, a boy and a girl, or a fool and a wise man, a hero and a coward, ought to be treated the same or valued or honoured in the same way.

The key difference between modern America and Canada on issues such as gay marriage - the reason three quarters of American states have banned it, but we embrace it - is that America has not abandoned as entirely as Canada its traditional belief that justice must be rooted in a spiritual and natural reality. Since the Trudeau era, however, Canada has wholly surrendered itself to the crassly materialistic and egalitarian mentality of the welfare state, where all public debate is reduced to a kind of internal civil war over equality and rights; it is only very rarely (and with embarrassment) a debate over the good, the natural, the morally obligatory, and the true. Needless to say, one of the last barriers to this frankly socialistic program - as any class on radical feminism will attest - has been the traditional definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, with all its historical privileges and protections (of late said to be patriarchal or the origin of class hatreds). In this exact sense we must realize that a "right" to homosexual "marriage"is not really aimed at elevating the status of homosexuality as much as it is aimed at dissolving the deep historical sense of privilege and status of true marriage and the heterosexuality that has always been one of its four conditions.

Well, civilizations rise, and then they fall. One of the reasons they fall is that they blind themselves, first morally and then intellectually to the natural sources of their own founding energy and success, gradually substituting for this a myriad of laws and policies intended to extend the reach of the state into every corner of private life by eliminating all natural differences between citizens and their customs and valued institutions that might constitute a threat to the official ideology of justice as equality. We have asked for it, and we are getting it. There is hardly a better, more effective way to efface the primordial public value of marriage than to remove the words "a man and a woman" wherever they occur on the hundreds of thousands of computers and legal documents of the state, and there substitute the words "any two persons."