The Weekly Dish - The Washington Times: Editorials/OP-ED - April 30, 2004
Andrew Sullivan in this one column shows why you can both love him and hate him in just a few column-inches. His quotes from Iraq are wonderful. His commentary on Welch's re-marriage is insane, particularly taken from the perspective of Karl Marx's desire for the fall of the institution of marriage.
And here is the focus of this post: Marx believed that Communism would win through a process of destroying the protestant capitalism that dominated his Victorian era; here showing a bit of Darwinistic style. Marx wanted no marital institution, just 1960's Free Love (a Marx's phrase, by the way).
We are living out in homosexual marriage the injection of Communist philosophy into modern life without the acknowledgment of Communist sources.
Marx would have suggested loosening the bounds of marriage through easier divorce. If divorce is more easily had, then marriage is less significant. If marriage is not then that significant, why cannot just anyone participate in such an institution, i.e., gays? This is Sullivan's argument about Welch's disrespect for marriage as an institution. Why save marriage for people that use marriage just the way Marx described it in his day?
This is a strong argument about the status quo of marriage. It does not address marriage as the institution it should be. The concept of covenant marriage, which raises the hurdles to divorce to a more pre-1960's concept, would undermine the Welch argument. Easy divorce would disappear as a source of "why not gays, too" argument. That still does not address why marriage at all.
Why marriage at all is the question that this debate needs to focus on. This question is where I struggle. I still cannot answer why today as easily as a bumpersticker would. Allow me to divert into why marriage in the past.
Marriage has historically been at its core about birth control and management. Without paternity tests, marriage allowed for control over men's obligation to support children and determine who could inherit from fathers. This protected children and women from men's sexual wanderlust causing financial devistation to the family. This was particularly true when men had all political control limited to the male sex. Few repercussions for his sexual wanderlust, just limited liability to the family for the wanderlust.
The classic examples in the extreme of kings like King Louis XIV having concubines while not letting his bastard children have any right to inherit the throne. Not unusual in that model of marriage.
The safety net for men was that the children born of their wives were presumed his.
Now with paternity tests, these legal constructs cannot do anything but fail. The true parental heritage is easily determinable. The institution as a safety net for presumed fidelity cannot survive the truth. So we see the question of why marriage in the past fails today. Science undermines legal expedience. Here I fear I have yet to answer why marriage today. Since I have little more time this morning to write, let me jump back to Sullivan's attack on Welch's example.
Does this allow us to use the bad examples to show the false reliance on the old insitution? Does a banana left in the kitchen for 3 weeks show that our institution of food delivery should be dismantled? That is non-sense. All the old banana proves is that one consumer failed to eat the banana as soon as the delivery system was designed. Welch's misuse of the system or the regularity of this abuse proves nothing about the propriety of homosexual marriage.
The answer must arise from determining why marry at all in today's environment? It cannot be about the fringe benefits: retirement plans, health insurance, etc. That can be handled in other ways. Why do we marry? Why do young and old alike seek marriage?
