« An American Hostage | Home | Lethal Injection: Cruel And Unusual? »

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Same Sex Marriage And 1900

(Bumped up)
Many thanks to those who wrote in with positive comments about this piece. I’m sticking it up on top for at least a little bit…

This is post number 1900 here on the Dartblog. In just over six months, I’ve averaged 10.5 posts per day, which I think is pretty good. But the number 1900 also gives me a convenient lead-in to a topic that will be in the news today, once again: marriage for homosexuals. The Great State of Oregon will have its Supreme Court rule on the issue today. Recall that an amendment to the Oregon Constitution passed (57% in favor) to legally define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Recall, also, that Constitutional amendments are, well, constitutional. With amendments passing in dozens of states, laws in others, and polls leaning conclusively- just as in the Schiavo case- in one direction on this issue, there is no question as to what modernity thinks of gay marriage.

Yet, there are those- and they are a vociferous few- who would have the hordes believe that if marriage is not nationally and institutionally altered to serve their desires, America will show itself to be a nation of savages; a place where decency cowers in the shadow of oppression and discrimination. One hundred years of societal mending will become undone. The tempered niceties built up by influential liberal thought will unscrew, embarrassing America in their eyes and those of a handful of European nations. Banning same sex marriage would be a supreme regression. 1900.

The problem is, in 1900 things weren’t all that different than today. In fact, just about every variable in this calculus stays the same when we rewind one hundred years, except for the wont of a small community, which previously relished its own culture but now craves a grave infringement upon ‘the establishment’. Upon an institution that, despite the rhetoric of some, is greater than any individual and any group. That’s marriage. And it was an ingenious little scheme, humming along swimmingly for, oh, about a millennium. Religious leaders- elites in their time, and rightly so- fabricated marriage in the 12th century to accomplish two huge goals; lordly goals, which were necessary to encourage a long-lasting peace and human tranquility. The aim of marriage and its raison d’etre is to (1) civilize men and (2) protect women. That’s it.

Those were the goals, and those are the goals. Any government incitement to marriage (through economic means, for example) is merely an assay to greater issuance of this most civilizing of covenants.

‘But the world has changed,’ proponents of same-sex marriage presume. ‘Men are docile and womanly, and women are empowered and manly.’ Perhaps the latter adjectives boast. But those are the internal calculations of extremely liberal minds. On liberal college campuses, such as Dartmouth, the argument that the world has changed and that same-sex marriage becomes it is the bedrock of any pro-gay marriage argument. Central to this assertion is the daily living experience in college. Co-eds here at Dartmouth walk the old Hanover Plain feeling entirely comfortable waving or saying, “hello” to an inconnu man. Perhaps that is the way it ought to be- this is college, after all, and what is college but a controlled and safety-pinned simulacrum of real life? The men at Dartmouth are similarly convinced that they are ‘modern men’. That the life of the mind in them is indomitable. That they are softer and more evolved than their forbears.

Neither assumption is safe.

Inside every woman there is an arcadia of emotional weakness that requires defending. Inside every man, anger lies in wait, and it requires a lifelong quell. These are fundamental truths that are borne out every day in every nation. An eon of gender-equalizing situation comedies will not change them. They are only subdued, and the world concurrently made more harmonious, when one force repels the other.

Marriage, the clever scheme that I spoke of earlier, has done a marvelous job in this regard. It has in fact done so well that my generation fails to discriminate between the sexes. We’ve co-opted a lingual term- gender- so that the word ‘sex’ needn’t define the two classes of humans. We fire successful university presidents when they presume that male and females are not equal. In place of the romantic Valentine’s Day, we produce lewd plays where women scream the name of their primary sexual organ to demonstrate their empowerment.

Of course, those are mere examples from the non-microcosm that is an elite and liberal institution of higher learning. In reality, Americans continually and significantly oppose gay marriage and oppose the myth of gender-equality. The movement for homosexual marriage is no more than those. It carries no more weight. For, like the other two phenomena, homosexual marriage ignores basic truths about the human condition. It co-opts a peaceful citadel and turns it into an instrument of extremist reform.

Marriage should not be amended to allow for same-sex bonds. It never existed for that purpose, and it never will. Marriage is alive and well because it does its job- making the world more peaceful: combining fire and water and producing harmony. Sometimes, as historians have documented, the product of lifelong peace is a mutated sense of values and an overarching wont to relativism. Those who have never known, writ large, the world of rough men and vulnerable women, suffer under illusions that it cannot exist. Those with eyes open, one ear towards voices of ancestry, and an even moral keel continue to resist gay marriage because it has no place in the institution whose name it takes. And they will win.

Posted on April 14, 2005 07:00 AM. Permalink