If marriage is lost, we lose everything

Memo to conservative defeatists: Surrender on gay marriage is surrender on marriage – which is surrender on the family and, ultimately, surrender on civilization.

Last Saturday, Glenn Beck held his Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C. An estimated 300,000 to half a million people came from all over the country. The Fox News host made the event an interfaith revival. "America today begins to turn back to God," Beck declared.

But while America turns back to God, Beck turns his back on God's law. Hey, that's catchy!

A guest on the "O'Reilly Factor" in early August, Beck was asked, "Do you believe that gay marriage is a threat to the country in any way?" Answer: "No I don't. Will gays come and get us?" Apparently, this jocularity was meant to belittle the bumpkins who oppose turning marriage into a free-form institution.

Beck then quoted his hero, Thomas Jefferson (who thought the French Revolution was groovy): "If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket what difference is it to me?" Apparently, demolishing the institution of marriage, and undermining the family, should be matters of supreme indifference to those fighting to save America from the clutches of Obamaism.

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Beck is one of a growing number of conservative opinion makers who are either agnostic on the issue or have decided to earn tolerance-points with the establishment by backing here-come-the-grooms. They include The View's Elizabeth Hasselbeck. ("I actually support gay marriage.") and Ross Douthat, poodle conservative of the New York Times op-ed page, whose hair-splitting here makes the late William F. Buckley Jr. sound coherent.

Then there's Ann Coulter who's speaking at Homocon, the September extravaganza sponsored by GOProud, which seeks to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, paving the way for the imposition of same-sex marriage nationwide, and the Republican congressional leaders who are falling all over themselves to attend a Sept. 22, D.C. fundraiser for the Log Cabin Republicans.

Ann says, "Giving a speech is not an endorsement of every position held by the people I'm speaking to."

Does that mean if a group of Hamas supporters organized for balanced budgets and homeschooling, Coulter would appear at their Jihadcon? Ann's 2007 book was titled: "Godless: The Church of Liberalism." Perhaps her next book will be called "Unprincipled: The Church of Ann Coulter."

This unwillingness to fight for the family, on which civilization depends, is another sign of the failure of modern conservatism. The right can win a thousand battles against big government and lose the war for America's future, if it surrenders on marriage and the family.

America's social traumas – illegitimacy, juvenile crime, drug abuse, female-headed-households – can all be traced back to the decline of the family, which started with the Great Society in the '60s, accelerated with no-fault divorce in the '70s, continued with the rise of cohabitation and reached its culmination with strange-sex marriage.

Offering competing models, socially sanctioned, undermines heterosexual marriage. Two men engaged in what used to be described as unnatural acts, become the legal/moral equivalent of a man and woman (husband and wife), joined by faith and tradition, doing society's essential work of childbearing and child-rearing.

Schools will teach that any living arrangement is as good as any other. Employers will be forced to provide "family benefits" to same-sex couples, regardless of religious scruples.

The state will be required to place children with gay couples for adoption, – depriving them of the father/mother role models necessary for successful adjustment. In Massachusetts, Catholic Charities ended its adoption program (the largest in the state), rather than submitting to placing children with homosexuals, as required in the nation's first gay-marriage state.

Ultimately, gay marriage will put churches and Bible-believers in the crosshairs – including Beck's LDS Church, which was viciously attacked for supporting Prop. 8.

Homosexual activists (among the most driven ideologues on the planet) will insist that all churches perform same-sex ceremonies – and push for withdrawal of charitable tax status of those that refuse. Hate-crime laws will be applied to the ministers and priests who preach Leviticus or Romans 1:26-27. In Europe and Canada, clerics have been hauled before human-rights tribunals for defending their faith from the pulpit.

Conservatives who support gay marriage will have to stop ragging on liberals for their elitism.

Voters of 30 states have amended their constitutions to prohibit recognition of pseudo-marriages, by an average vote of 67 percent. In 2008, in the most liberal state in the nation, 7 million Californians cast their ballots for the only definition of marriage that makes sense.

Glenn Beck (self-styled populist) is telling them their views are inconsequential, and that he's willing to let the courts inflict gay marriage on their cringing heads. Don't they know that these mock marriages (dearly beloved of the establishment) neither break Beck's legs nor pick his pocket?

All they do is accelerate the decline of an institution as old as human society. How can we say yes to gay marriage and no to polygamy, group marriage, cohabitation, child brides and other lifestyle choices seeking official sanction?

Unfortunately, many conservative intellectuals have lost sight of a crucial fact: American exceptionalism rests on three pillars – faith, family and freedom. Remove any one, and the entire structure collapses.

How can you have a strong economy without strong families? As economist Ludwig Von Mises noted, deferred consumption is necessary for capitalism to work. That means individuals willing to sacrifice for the future – and that means families.

Without the family, it doesn't matter how many times we defeat socialism (nationalized health care, government takeover of business, soaring deficits, redistributionism), in the end, we lose – which is why the left has made same-sex marriage its priority, and why it is less tolerant of dissent here than anywhere else.

Conservatives who don't understand this understand nothing.