More from Douglas Farrow’s Touchstone article. BTW, the book he references, A Nation of Bastards is available from the Ruth Institute Reading List, along with a bunch of other good books. I have been making this point for some time: the immediate impact of same sex marriage is very far from its full long-run impact, very much as “reducing the cost of divorce for people in bad marriages,” was a long way from being the main impact or final impact of eliminating the fault basis for divorce.
To make matters very much worse, the parens patriae power has recently received an enormous boost from another feature of the contraceptive society: same-sex “marriage.” Though most people have not yet realized it, the advent of same-sex marriage has transformed marriage from a pre-political institution conferring “divine and human rights,” as the Roman jurist Modestinus put it, into a mere legal construct at the gift and disposal of the state. The legal terrain has thus changed dramatically, along with the cultural—something I have tried to show in a little book called Nation of Bastards. The family is ceasing to be what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights confesses it to be, viz., “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.”
Replaced by a kaleidoscope of transient sexual and psychological configurations, which serve chiefly to make children of adults and adults of children, the declining family is ceding enormous tracts of social and legal territory to the state. At law, parent-child relationships are losing their a priori status and privilege. Crafty fools ask foolish fools, “What harm does same-sex marriage do to your marriage, or to your family?” The truthful answer is: Same-sex marriage makes us all chattels of the state, because the state, in presuming to define the substance rather than the accidents of marriage, has made marriage itself a state artifact.
Those who have trouble connecting the dots here—which lamentably includes many defenders of the traditional institution—should take time to consider the fact that the new “inclusive” definition, in striking procreation from the purview of marriage, has left both parents and children without a lawful institution that respects and guarantees their natural rights to each other.
Opening up marriage in principle to non-generative unions really means closing it in principle to the inter-generational interests on which it has always been based. From now on, the handling of those interests will be entirely dependent, legally speaking, upon the good graces of the state. Every citizen will stand naked before the state, unclothed by his most fundamental community, unbuffered by any mediating institution with its own inherent rights. Nor should it be overlooked that, what the state has the power to define, it has the power to define again and again, and even to dispense with.
Admittedly, even the state has not yet fully connected the dots, but that is happening with remarkable rapidity, as concurrent moves in education demonstrate. States and international agencies are increasingly prone to argue that children have the right to a state-directed education and that this right must be protected by the state against the interference of parents. The logic is not difficult to follow: If marriage is procreative, it is also educative; but if it is not procreative, it is not educative either—educative rights and responsibilities are up for grabs, and it is the state that will do the grabbing. The pillar that is the family appears to have cracked nearly through.
Read it all here: Touchstone Archives: The Audacity of the State.