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Saturday, July 27, 2013

Why we're losing the battle for marriage










Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Government at Patrick Henry College and a Research Fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society; the Independent Institute; and the Inter-American Institute. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and has taught at Howard University, Catholic University, and Palacky University in the Czech Republic. His books include Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution, and Taken Into Custody: The War against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family. His writings have appeared in publications too numerous to list in this newsletter.



This article was first published April 8, 2013, at World Net Daily.com.


The fight to save marriage, as currently being waged, is largely pointless. It simply cannot be won on these terms. If defenders of marriage can let go of their own politically correct fixations and squarely face some harsh but incontrovertible facts, it is still possible to stop the impending destruction of marriage by the courts.

First: Marriage exists to attach the father to the family. It is not a gender-neutral institution. Marriage breakdown produces widespread fatherlessness, not motherlessness. (Motherlessness often follows, but fatherlessness begins the process.) The father is the weakest link in the family chain, and without enforceable marriage bonds, he is easily discarded. This is glaringly obvious: American inner cities, native American reservations, northern England, Parisian banlieues, Africa – all are impoverished, crime-ridden and drug-infested matriarchies. Fatherlessness – not poverty or race – predicts social pathology among the young. Without paternal authority, adolescents run wild, and society descends into chaos.

Once this principle is recognized, same-sex marriage makes no sense. Judge Vaughn Walker’s finding of “fact” in the Proposition 8 case that “Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage” is rendered preposterous. Same-sex marriage simply mocks true marriage. Homosexual parenting marginalizes children still further from their fathers (and sometimes mothers), who lose their children to homosexuals usually through divorce.

Thus the second unpleasant fact: Homosexuals did not destroy marriage; heterosexuals did. The demand for same-sex marriage is a symptom, not a cause, of marriage deterioration. The major threat is obviously divorce. As Mike McManus of Marriage Savers writes, “Divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.”


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