By: Paul Murano – July 2013
Last week DOMA was stuck down by the Supreme Court by one vote, and it made liberals and libertarians very happy. It made them happy because both groups believe marriage is not an extension of human nature with an objective form and purpose, but rather a man-made institution that man can change at will. They see it as positive law, not natural law.
Most of those disappointed by the decision believe that natural marriage is the foundation of society and civilization, and that the court struck another major blow contributing to its eventual demise. Yet, you would think that with such a claim, if it were true, traditional marriage would have no problem remaining the form that governments continue to recognize. If the health of the individual and society depends on healthy and stable marriages of a man and woman then why are the courts and a sizable minority of the population winning the war on marriage? The answer is rather simple. Hypocrisy.
The greatest blow to marriage in modern times came not with the addition of persons of the same sex, but with the division of sex from marriage. If proponents of traditional or natural marriage want to win this war they must convey the true vision and full meaning of marriage and not offer a message of compromise, continuing to offer deafening silence to the grave distortion that the sexual revolution unleashed on marriage and the family with premarital sex. The great “Generation gap” of the 1960’s and 70’s was mostly about sex & family: The post WWII hippie generation proposed, for the first time since pagan times, that sexual expression become morally licit outside of the life-long commitment of marriage. It was truly shocking. This brought sexual union from being understood as the natural signification of the permanent comingling of two selves into one – to the foolish dualistic notion that there can be two-in-one-flesh intimacy without bonding; that when you give yourself to someone you can take yourself fully back. Of course the term fornication quickly evolved into the more acceptable “premarital sex” and then to “meaningful relationship” as the language twisted to fit the new false paradigm.
Losing sight of the meaning of marriage over the subsequent four decades in which the pill unleashed the fornication revolution that shocked the world, led to inevitable consequences attacking the three essential components of marriage, which are fidelity, permanence, and openness to children. That is, fornication attacked faithfulness and exclusivity; no-fault divorce, permanence; and contraception, openness to children. With the three essential components now virtually forgotten from the collective consciousness of the western world, we are left with an understanding of marriage that is only a rotting shell of what it actually is. Any reasonable person can see that this newest distortion of “same-sex marriage” and future distortions will continue to unravel marriage to become nothing but a non-descript “relationship” with whomever or whatever one temporarily chooses. After all, is there much difference now in the minds of the masses between what is now called a “relationship” and a marriage?
If marriage and family are to be saved the era of denial must end. Either marriage is the intimate outgrowth of human nature that fulfills the individual and the species in the form of permanent exclusive union of a man and woman, or it is nothing at all. We can no longer play the game of contributing to the scandalous silence in the midst of the world’s first fornication culture while self esteem plummets and the union of marriage is desecrated. Until people understand and articulate a vision of marriage that is not tainted with compromise to post-pill modernity we will get nowhere. And until enough people muster up the courage to take a strong stand against the premarital sex culture and all the rationalizations that attempt to support it, marriage cannot be saved.
Marriage has been raped of its profound meaning since the pill “freed” women and children to be used and abused. Hypocritical and severely compromised messages on how to bring about the cure will never render successful results.