2004-02-15 Homosexual Marriage and Civilization/text/9

Humpty Has Struck Before
 We've already seen similar attempts at redefinition. The ideologues have demanded that we stop defining "families" as Dad, Mom, and the kids. Now any grouping of people might be called a "family."

But this doesn't turn them into families, or even make rational people believe they're families. It just makes it politically unacceptable to use the word family in any meaningful way.

The same thing will happen to the word marriage if the Massachusetts decision is allowed to stand, and is then enforced nationwide because of the "full faith and credit" clause in the Constitution.

Just because you give legal sanction to a homosexual couple and call their contract a "marriage" does not make it a marriage. It simply removes marriage as a legitimate word for the real thing.

If you declare that there is no longer any legal difference between low tide and high tide, it might stop people from publishing tide charts, but it won't change the fact that sometimes the water is lower and sometimes it's higher.

Calling a homosexual contract "marriage" does not make it reproductively relevant and will not make it contribute in any meaningful way to the propagation of civilization.

In fact, it will do harm. Nowhere near as much harm as we have already done through divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing. But it's another nail in the coffin. Maybe the last nail, precisely because it is the most obvious and outrageous attack on what is left of marriage in America.

Supporters of homosexual "marriage" dismiss warnings like mine as the predictable ranting of people who hate progress. But the Massachusetts Supreme Court has made its decision without even a cursory attempt to ascertain the social costs. The judges have taken it on faith that it will do no harm.

You can't add a runway to an airport in America without years of carefully researched environmental impact statements. But you can radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society without political process or serious research.

Let me put it another way. The sex life of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn't bothered them. That's what tolerance looks like.

But homosexual "marriage" is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society -- to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.

So if my friends insist on calling what they do "marriage," they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is.

Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage.

They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes.