You'd Think the World Is About to End

[Updates below.]

Maggie Gallagher on National Review Online:

Winning the gay-marriage debate may be hard, but to those of us who witnessed the fall of Communism, despair is inexcusable and irresponsible. Losing this battle means losing the idea that children need mothers and fathers. It means losing the marriage debate. It means losing limited government. It means losing American civilization. It means losing, period.

Jeepers.

Polygamy is not worse than gay marriage, it is better. At least polygamy, for all its ugly defects, is an attempt to secure stable mother-father families for children.

What the fuck? All you hear from Man-Woman Marriage Conservatives (MWMC) is how the erosion of the sanctity of heterosexual marriage drives a huge stake through the heart of morality, strong familial growth, and societal standards. I cannot see how considering a union of three or more people (thereby guaranteeing at least one homosexual relationship) can be better for tradtional family structure rather than two people of the same sex.

By embracing gay marriage the legal establishment will have declared that the public purposes of marriage no longer include anything to do with making babies, or giving children mothers and fathers.

I had always thought marriage was about two people who love each another so much they make a formal contract signing themselves into a union. MWMCs simply cannot clear the hurdle on this issue: no one has the right to determine who can marry who, provided the people involved wish to marry. They want to limit the freedom of certain people because they don't follow a "traditional" life and make "traditional" choices.

Do we also need marriage?

The answer to this question is, I think, abundantly clear from 40 years of experimentation both here and in Europe. The consequences of our current retreat from marriage is not a flourishing libertarian social order, but a gigantic expansion of state power and a vast increase in social disorder and human suffering. The results of the marriage retreat are not merely personal or religious. When men and women fail to form stable marriages, the first result is a vast expansion of government attempts to cope with the terrible social needs that result. There is scarcely a dollar that state and federal government spends on social programs that is not driven in large part by family fragmentation: crime, poverty, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, school failure, mental and physical health problems. Even Medicare spending is inflated, as elderly singles spend more of their years in nursing homes.

The conservative project of limited government depends on recovering marriage as the normal, usual, and generally reliable way to raise children.

This is quite possibly the best example of irrational thought overriding core principles. Ms. Gallagher says conservatives want to have a limited government, but broken families result in bigger government through entitlements, handouts, and social assistence.

Well...why not do something about THAT (and consequently do far more good) than imposing the ugly presence of the government in personal relationships? Here she is, complaining about expanding government and she would DO THE SAME DAMN THING to restrict a person's option to legally marry. If she is truely concerned about the welfare state, then the most reasonable and direct solution is to get her guiding philosophy in order and state forthrightly that such creeping socialism is not to be tolerated REGARDLESS of what causes it; she should then demand a real and substantial rollback in those laws and a solid campaign against the forces that wish to keep and impose them.

But no, it's more important to keep homosexuals from marrying. Why? Because anything other than a man-woman marriage inevitably destroys the social fabric surrounding it. Leaving aside the mountainous evidence such claims require to ring true, those claims lead one to say other ridiculous things like:

The future belongs to people who do the hard things necessary to reproduce not only themselves, but their civilization. Marriage is not an option, it is a precondition for social survival. Not everyone lives up to the marriage ideal in this or any civilization. But when a society abandons the marriage idea altogether as a shared public norm, do not expect private individuals to be able to sustain marriage.

My emphasis. A precondition for social survival? The rage at homosexual marriage has played havoc with this woman's remaining mental processes. So much so that she forgets that homosexuals don't want to abandon the idea of marriage and WANT TO GET MARRIED, not be forced into the hedonistic freewheeling "fuck it" lifestyles they are accused so often of...and such a position as hers keeps the legal boot in their face and keeps them down in that area, if they choose to live like that.

I don't support government-approved marriage and agree with David Boaz that it should be privatized. You'd think people who claim to be about personal responsibility, freedom, and small government would be all for removing the state from these kinds of things. But consistency is almost impossible to find among the conservative pundit class.

The sheer howling pissyness MWMCs are bleating over this is profoundly disappointing.

UPDATE(12/8/2003 12:55pm)
More on Ms. (Mrs.?) Gallagher here.

UPDATE 1/26/2005 8:58am
Maggie Gallagher on the Take?

Posted by Drizzten at July 14, 2003 06:55 PM