More on same-sex “marriage” — Yes on California’s Proposition 8

The biggest fraud this election isn’t the presidential election, although that’s a close second, but the vote over same-sex “marriage” out here in Nutsifornia. This shouldn’t even be an issue because there is no such thing as same-sex “marriage.” It’s a fraud, an absurdity.

But last May, four members of the California Supreme Court imposed on the state this “right.” The four should have been immediately removed from the court and exiled from the state. But these are insane times, so they remain on the court, and their preposterous edict remains in effect.

Voters on Nov. 4 will get to choose whether to enact a slight return to sanity by passing Proposition 8, which reverses the court ruling and bans same-sex “marriage.” But if it loses, the foolishness will become enshrined in state law with the stamp of approval of the voters. From then on, anyone who objects to this joke will be told, “Well, the people of California have spoken. They like same-sex ‘marriage.’ So shut up.”

My favorite magazine, Chronicles (subscribe here), just came out with its November election issue. Editor Thomas Fleming writes (not online):

Both camps [Republicans and Democrats] have their own reasons for the cordon sanitaire that has been placed, quite properly, around Mrs. Palin’s children. Since neither party has the slightest interest in decency or good manners, what they are really saying is that the way in which politicians conduct themselves or manage their family responsibilities is of no interest to the electorate. I wish someone had told the Republcians this when they were going after Bill Clinton. In some states, Bristol [Palin] could marry a Suzie instead of a Levi, and, before this generation passes away, she will be able to marry both Levi and Suzie and perhaps the family’s entire team of sled dogs, because marriage has been made the mere creature of the state, which can choose to define it in any way that pleases the current consensus of college professors, media moguls, and judges we call “public opinion.”

Polygamy next

Of course, you know that’s all going to happen. First the renegade Mormon sects will sue for the “right” of men to marry forty 15-year-old girls, using the same “equality” argument being used against Prop. 8 — and they’ll win. Then the animal rights fanatics will insist on their right to “marry” their pet gerbils.

How should family issues such as same-sex “marriage” be addressed? I mean politically, because there can be no such thing as same-sex marriage. It is a mere figment of the imagination like the unicorn, but worse: It is a self-contradictory figment, something like a unicorn with two horns. As a colleague once sagely observed to me, erotic relations between two men or two women are not sexual, since the very word sex requires male and female.

Dr. Fleming includes a useful discussion of the difference between a democracy and a republic, which I will leave to the print edition because our state flag says we are the “California Republic.”

Since marriage, family, and kinship are prior to the state, which draws its legitimacy from these connections of blood and sex, a true republic would be loath to interfere in marriage and, at the very least, could never redefine this basic institution of our common life, either by permitting no-fault divorce or by creating the fiction of civil unions between homosexuals, which is merely marriage by another name.

There is, in fact, a wealth of solid information, from historians and anthropologists, on Western and non-Western cultures, and despite the creative richness and ingenuity men and women have displayed in devising exotic forms of marriage and family, they converge, statistically, upon a human norm of a monogamous pair of a faithful wife and a not always perfectly faithful husband mated more or less for life and dedicated to the happiness and well-being of their children over whom they exercise something like sovereign authority.

It is from the family and from networks of extended kinfolks that larger social and political structures have been developed, up to and including the nation-state and the world state that is being constructed in our lifetime. The family constructed civilization and the state, not vice versa.

De-legitimizing the state

Dr. Fleming’s point is one I have been making to my libertarian friends: The state (meaning here the government as the holder of monopoly sovereignty, not just the state of California) has no right redefine marriage. Doing so dissolves marriage and de-legitimizes the state. If Prop. 8 is defeated, families will have no alternative but to react to the state the way a mother would to an adder attacking her children.

Civilization and political systems are fragile, but marriage and family are natural institutions, and although they can be corrupted, distorted, and damaged by human arrogance and folly, the results will always be the same: social collapse followed by a renewal of all the ancient and beautiful things without which human life is impossible.

Maybe Prop. 8’s opponents should campaign with this theme: “Keep same-sex ‘marriage’ so civilization collapses instanter and we can more quickly begin rebuilding it.”

Dr. Fleming adds:

If we could ever succeed in lifting the dead hand of government from our everyday lives — cutting taxes and rolling back virtually all the social legislation of the past 100 years — we should not have to worry too much about the state of the family….

Get the state OUT of marriage, not deeper into it

Libertarians especially, listen up to this next part:

One obvious answer to the questions raised by same-sex “marriage” and no-fault divorce is that it should not be the state’s business to define or even regulate marriage. Marriage, as a good republican [small “r” here; not the political party] should understand, is not a private contract between individuals or a matter for legislation. Marriage unites families, not individuals, and if the families belong to a religion, their marriage customs will be regulated by their church.

The one helpful thing that a government can do is not to interfere in the right of private contract that would allow a Christian couple to draw up a marriage covenant, restricting the justification for divorce to specific offenses, stipulating custody, and regulating inheritance. If two businessmen can form a partnership, why have so many state legislators tried to prevent husbands and wives from doing the same thing?

I’ll answer that: It’s because so many state legislators want do dump their wives for younger models, and are too cheap to spring for a trip to Vegas. But there’s no reason we have to put up with their continuing assault — going on 40 years now — on marriage and family.

Whatever happens to Prop. 8 on Nov. 4, the call should go up: Give us the right to private marriage contracts!

Yes on Prop. 8

In the meantime, if you’re unfortunate enough to live here in the Pyrite State, vote Yes on Prop. 8.