Forget 'gay Marriage' - Divorce Is The Real Issue

[MithLuin]

I came across this article when a friend linked to it on facebook. I don't agree with some of the political posturing, but I do find the essential main point quite sound. Homosexuals pushing for their relationships to be recognized as marriage is not what is undermining or destroying traditional marriage in our society. If we want to fight [i]that[/i], fight to protect marriage - then we have to do something about the divorce rate. No-fault divorce is the real culprit, and no one seems to be doing anything about that.

[quote]Defenders of marriage must face some hard facts or they are going to lose their fight—and with it, quite possibly, their religious freedom as well. Federal judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling nullifying Proposition 8 in California illustrates that, unless we can demonstrate very specific reasons why same-sex marriage is socially destructive, it will soon be the law of the land.

With conservatives as prominent as Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter joining those “influential Americans,” in the words of the National Review, who “have been coming increasingly to regard opposition to same-sex marriage as irrational at best and bigoted at worst,” we can no longer rely on vague assertions that homosexual marriage weakens true marriage in some way—which in itself, actually, it does not.

Considerable nonsense has been written by some opponents of same-sex marriage, while some critical truths are not being heard. Confronting the facts can enable us to win not only this battle but several even more important ones involving family decline and the social anomie* it produces.

First: Marriage exists primarily to cement the father to the family. This fact is politically incorrect but undeniable. The breakdown of marriage produces widespread fatherlessness, not motherlessness. As Margaret Mead pointed out long ago—yes, leftist Margaret Mead was correct about this—motherhood is a biological certainty whereas fatherhood is socially constructed. The father is the weakest link in the family bond, and without the institution of marriage he is easily discarded.

The consequences of failing to link men to their offspring are apparent the world over. From our inner cities and Native American reservations to the north of England, the banlieues of Paris, and much of Africa, fatherlessness—not poverty or race—is the leading predictor of virtually every social pathology among the young. Without fathers, adolescents run wild, and society descends into chaos.

The notion that marriage exists for love or “to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults,” as one proponent puts it, is cant. Many loving and emotional human relationships do not involve marriage. Even the conservative argument that marriage exists to rear children is too imprecise: marriage creates fatherhood. No marriage, no fathers.

Once this principle is recognized, same-sex marriage makes no sense. Judge Walker’s “finding of fact” that “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage” is rendered preposterous. Marriage between two men or two women simply mocks the purpose of the institution. Homosexual parenting only further distances biological fathers (and some mothers too) from their children, since at least some homosexual parents must acquire their children from someone else—usually through heterosexual divorce.

Here is the second unpleasant truth: homosexuals did not destroy marriage, heterosexuals did. The demand for same-sex marriage is a symptom, not a cause, of the deterioration of marriage. By far the most direct threat to the family is heterosexual divorce. “Commentators miss the point when they oppose homosexual marriage on the grounds that it would undermine traditional understandings of marriage,” writes family scholar Bryce Christensen. “It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it.”

...

Thus the third inconvenient fact: divorce is a political problem. It is not a private matter, and it does not come from impersonal forces of moral and cultural decay. It is driven by complex and lucrative government machinery operating in our names and funded by our taxes. It is imposed upon unwilling people, whose children, homes, and property may be confiscated. It generates the social ills that rationalize almost all domestic government spending. And it is promoted ideologically by the same sexual radicals who now champion same-sex marriage. Homosexuals may be correct that heterosexuals destroyed marriage, but the heterosexuals were their fellow sexual ideologues.

Conservatives have completely misunderstood the significance of the divorce revolution. While they lament mass divorce, they refuse to confront its politics. Maggie Gallagher attributes this silence to “political cowardice”: “Opposing gay marriage or gays in the military is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue,” she wrote in 1996. “The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.”

...

This failure has seriously undermined the moral credibility of the campaign against same-sex marriage. “People who won’t censure divorce carry no special weight as defenders of marriage,” writes columnist Froma Harrop. “Moral authority doesn’t come cheap.”

Just as marriage creates fatherhood, so divorce today should be understood as a system for destroying it. It is no accident that divorce court has become largely a method for plundering and criminalizing fathers. With such a regime arrayed against them, men are powerfully incentivized against marrying and starting a family. No amount of scolding by armchair moralists is going to persuade men into marriages that can mean the loss of their children, expropriation, and incarceration.

The fourth point is perhaps the most difficult to grasp: marriage is not entirely a public institution that government may legitimately define and regulate. It certainly serves important public functions. But marriage also creates a sphere of life beyond official control—what Supreme Court Justice Byron White called a “realm of family life which the state cannot enter.” This does not mean that anything can be declared a marriage. On the contrary, it means that marriage creates a singular zone of privacy for one purpose above all: it is the bond within which parents may raise their children without government interference.

Parenthood, after all, is politically unique. It is the one relationship in which people may exercise coercive authority over others. It is the one exception to state’s monopoly of force, which is why government is constantly trying to undermine and invade it. Without parental and especially paternal authority, legitimized by the bonds of marriage, government’s reach is total. This is already evident in those communities where marriage and fathers have disappeared and government has moved in to replace them with welfare, child-support enforcement, public education, and tax-subsidized healthcare.



* Anomie is a sociological term meaning "personal feeling of a lack of social norms; normlessness". It describes the breakdown of social norms and values.

See more:
[url]http://www.amconmag.com/blog/divorced_from_reality/[/url] [/quote]

The author is Stephen Baskerville, who is on the faculty at Patrick Henry College, a Christian school in Virginia. He is himself divorced, which might explain some of his bitterness with the family courts in the US.

[quote]Six years ago I took wedding vows in a church within the Diocese of Washington. I dutifully recited "till death do us part," and the minister declared, "What God hath joined together..." and so forth. On my wedding ring are inscribed the words, "pour toujours."

Five years later, and after the birth of my first child, I found myself summoned to court in Fairfax County (where I did not live) on 36 hours notice. Though I was accused of no wrongdoing and had given no grounds for divorce, I was interrogated by a lawyer and forced to answer a series of humiliating questions about intimate aspects of my relationship with my daughter, conversations with my wife, and a variety of private family matters.

Without a lawyer of my own and with very little opportunity to speak on my own behalf, I was then legally stripped of custody of my child and told to stay away from her all but two days a week. A restraining order was placed on me preventing me from taking her outside the jurisdiction of the court (a jurisdiction thousands of miles from my home), and I was ordered to surrender all her documents in my possession, including her British passport.

I was then told that I could see my second child (who was not yet born) for one three-hour period on a weekday every two weeks. Had I refused to comply I could have been jailed. Now, a year later, my marriage can be dissolved over my objections and my rights as a parent terminated.

Few people realize the virtually absolute power of courts to invade and carve up a family, to take children away from parents who have done nothing wrong, to dissolve marriages without giving any reasons and to order the summary incarceration of parents who refuse to acquiesce - few people, that is, to whom it has not happened.

Naturally I feel I was deceived when I married in the church, and so apparently was the minister who married me. Like most people, I assumed that if I kept my vows and obeyed the law, no one could separate me from my children or interfere in my family without my consent. From talking to my own pastors and others, it is clear that this is also what they and most of their congregations assume. Yet I have come to realize that my experience is shared by hundreds if not thousands of parents every day.[/quote]

Thoughts?

[Sternhauser]

But . . . but . . . if people with disordered attractions toward the same sex are prevented from forming civil unions, then true marriages won't disintegrate any more. Married people will suddenly start wanting to, you know, have kids and stuff. Make all divorce illegal, and everything will start to turn around, you'll see. Making divorce illegal would be for the common good.

~Sternhauser

Edited November 27, 2010 by Sternhauser

[MithLuin]

I don't think that making [i]all[/i] divorce illegal is the way to go, since there are situations that are completely criminal. It's one thing to complain about parental rights being taken away when you did nothing wrong, another matter entirely if you were sexually abusing or physically neglecting your children or something. No-fault divorce is tearing apart the fabric of our society, though, and when does anyone every suggest doing away with it? If deadbeat dads are a problem...don't let them walk away so easily!

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='MithLuin' timestamp='1290838502' post='2189515']
I don't think that making [i]all[/i] divorce illegal is the way to go, since there are situations that are completely criminal. It's one thing to complain about parental rights being taken away when you did nothing wrong, another matter entirely if you were sexually abusing or physically neglecting your children or something. No-fault divorce is tearing apart the fabric of our society, though, and when does anyone every suggest doing away with it? If deadbeat dads are a problem...don't let them walk away so easily!
[/quote]

Mith, as with all social issues, it won't be solved from the top down, with the monopoly violence of the State. (I liked the author's choice of words.) Society lives [i]according[/i] to certain norms before laws are ever [i]passed[/i], and society[i] ignores[/i] certain laws before they are ever [i]abolished[/i]. Don't make the mistake of trying to push the rope of society, and [i]certainly[/i] don't make the mistake of trying to put a rope around society's neck and trying to drag it to where you want it to be. It doesn't respond well to that. Society is comprised of free will interactions. That means you need to [i]convince[/i] people to act of their own free wills. They must be shown the good, and brought to love it. You can't put [i]sand[/i] in a ball of flour and water and expect it to rise up. Sand does not cause dough to rise. It is not how dough works. Likewise, it is not the nature of society to be [i]forced[/i] into anything. You must be the leaven of society, not someone holding a gun to other people's heads.

~Sternhauser

[MithLuin]

Well, yes. I have no intention of ever getting divorced. But I am sick of people treating broken families as an inevitable outcome.

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='MithLuin' timestamp='1290885780' post='2189552']
Well, yes. I have no intention of ever getting divorced. But I am sick of people treating broken families as an inevitable outcome.
[/quote]

Excellent. Then harness that nausea, and use it to write, as Dietrich Von Hildebrand did, in vehement and cogent defense of the divinely-created institution of marriage [i]as[/i] such. Pick marriage up out of the mud where it has lain, trampled by swine, and clean it off and present it to the world, so that people can see it for the beautiful thing it actually is.

~Sternhauser

Edited November 28, 2010 by Sternhauser