Proposing madness

The recent dispute in Vermont over the issue of homosexual marriage
was just the latest flare-up in an ongoing national struggle -- the
result of which will fundamentally affect both the moral culture and the
fundamental institutions of our society. If our states and, ultimately,
our entire country reach the wrong judgment in such matters, they might
very well undo permanently not only the basis of our liberty but the
basis of our civilization itself.

It is a struggle that has been going on for some time. In the '60s
there was the sexual "revolution," which achieved some success by
promising liberation without consequences. In the '70s we had Roe v.
Wade. And for decades we have endured a steady erosion of standards of
decency both public and private. The battle has ebbed and flowed and
yet, overall, one must admit that we are far advanced in a project to
unleash forces of moral decay that have been devastating to the social
fabric and to the conduct and the character of our people. In the last
several years, our national moral crisis has taken up a kind of personal
residency in the White House; we have seen the great threat that it
poses to the integrity that we need in order to maintain our
institutions of self-government.

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The decision whether Vermont (or other states) will adopt "domestic
partnership" as an appeasement for protecting the privileged condition
of the heterosexual marriage-based family has enormous
implications. Just as the decisions made in the '60s and '70s continue
to unfold in their consequences before our eyes, so will the decision to
abandon the legal defense of marriage, once made, unfold its damage for
decades to come -- for we are talking about formally abandoning the
institution which is the building block of everything that we know as
social reality.

It is true that not every society in history has defended the family
institution. But then not every society has known freedom and sustained
it either -- and, at root, this is the same project. Because liberty
requires strong individuals: people who do not derive their sense of
worth from the government, from the state or from society at large.
Preserving a free society requires that people enter into that society
as adults who are already established in their sense of their individual
worth and dignity. Whatever fantasies the social engineers may cook up,
the only proven way to produce such individuals is to encourage families
in which individual persons are respected as such -- as the unique and
respected result of a union that exists for their sake. The school of
personhood which the family conducts for its members not only provides
the deepest lifelong support for its particular members but is also the
basis for the concept of "individual" on which our society is based.

The homosexual marriage movement proposes that government withdraw
from the heterosexual marriage-based family the respect in law and other
regulations which has been accorded to it by every decent form of
government that has existed in modern civilization. Respect or
disrespect for marriage is a deeper issue for a society than even the
form of government a society selects because marriage-based families
constitute the only cohesive social fabric for human communities. It is
not far from the truth to say that a people that turns its back on
marriage is thereby deciding that it can manage its affairs without
responsible adults (because responsible adults are only reliably
produced by families headed by responsible adults).

This is why the defense of marriage is particularly crucial for a
people with our form of government -- one which presumes that government
is constituted by a people which come together first in civil society
and then, by their free and presumably responsible choice, constitute a
government, write a Constitution, and generally take charge of their own
affairs. Can such a people afford casually to back away from the
constant labor of preparing the next generation of citizens? Far from
casually neglecting this task, our Founders understood that among the
principal purposes of the government they were instituting was the
protection of the most sacred property we have -- our moral character
and institutions, including marriage and the family.

So if the government then turns on those institutions and begins to
undermine their base, then that government is disrespecting the compact
which brought it into existence. This fundamental departure of
government from its true role will eventually and infallibly result in
the unraveling of the very social fabric of the country.

Despite the histrionic rhetoric of some, with their constant and
superficial invocations of "privacy" and its supposedly supreme
importance, the debate over marriage is not a matter of anyone's
personal satisfaction and it is not an inherently "private" question.
However private are the actual activities sheltered by the marriage
institution, the institution itself is one of the most crucial common
goods and, accordingly, its health is a critical matter of decidedly
public concern.

The marriage-based family is an institution that has existed for
thousands of years and that will be here when we are gone. It has
sustained other civilizations before us that have been the very basis
and foundation for all that we know and are. Our stewardship of the
family institution has implications far beyond the doors of our homes,
and far beyond our lifetimes.

I wish that the supporters of "domestic partnerships" understood
this. The revolution that they are attempting doesn't just undo one
law; it puts the wrecking ball to the work of thousands of years in
which, by a slow and painful process, the institutions that came
together to help create the possibility of our free way of life were
formed and matured. The family was one of those institutions and it
stands on the solid foundation of its own claims.

Some shortsighted people, when they see certain kinds of privilege
and recognition accorded by law to the family, can see only that the
government has granted a benefit to families and that therefore they
should have it too. What they miss, of course, is that government did
not give any privileges to the family -- families had a natural priority
among human institutions even before governments came into existence.
The family is not created by government; government is created by
individuals living in their families and entering public life to protect
them.

There are many issues involved in the debate over "domestic
partnerships" and the legal status of marriage. Issues of religious
liberty, of sexual morality and of the relation of these things to our
laws and our culture swirl about in any discussion of officially
legitimizing "alternative" domestic arrangements. Next week I want to
take up some of the particular arguments that are offered by advocates
of the activist homosexual agenda, including the claim that American
principles of religious liberty support their attempt to take
heterosexual marriage off its pedestal. It is not hard to refute this
claim and we should do so.

More important than refutations of the particular sophistries that
oppose us, however, is recognizing that the attack on marriage is an
attack on the primal pattern of human life and is, accordingly, a
breathtakingly cavalier and thoughtless project. It is the kind of
irresponsible thing that we rightly associate with the worst attitudes
of unreflective and inexperienced youth. The supporters of "domestic
partnership" know very well, in one sense, what they are doing. They
know that they are attacking the privileged position of the
marriage-based, two-parent family, and this apparently seems to them to
be an eminently rational thing to do. So might the teen-ager who has
taken the family car on a joy ride that ended in wreck and tragedy say
that "it seemed like a good idea at the time." So might the crazed
Soviet scientists convince themselves to try to reverse the course of
the greatest rivers in nature.

Sometimes refutation is not the best response. We need to recover
our ability to look at such people and tell them, in charity, that they
propose madness.