By Paul Kengor
As
the Supreme Court considers rendering unto itself the right to redefine
marriage -- that is, to arrogate to itself something heretofore
reserved to the laws of nature and nature’s God -- it’s a good time to
have something that liberals always insist we have: a conversation. And
given liberals’ constant calls for “tolerance” and “diversity,” they
ought to be willing to sit back and join us in a civil, healthy
dialogue.
To
that end, I invite them to consider something so crucial and yet so
neglected that I wrote a full book on it, released just in time for this
national conversation on marriage. It’s titled, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, and I sincerely wish liberals would lend it their professed toleration and open-mindedness.
Before I share my thesis, I should clarify my own stance.
I
support the natural-traditional-biblical definition of marriage that
has been Western civilization’s standard for multiple millennia. My
position echoes my Roman Catholic faith. Basically, in a nutshell, my
position is Pope Francis’ position (properly understood).
Though Piers Morgan marvels at my position as “extraordinary,” it’s
merely the one held by your grandparents, great grandparents,
great-great grandparents… great-great-great-great-great-great-great
grandparents and the ongoing long line of ancestors who preceded them.
Even the ancient Greeks and Romans, long viewed as the models of
perversity, never broached the unthinkable prospect of same-gender
people marrying. That simply has never been marriage. What millions of
Americans are rushing to do right now is completely unprecedented.
Today’s
leftists should understand that they are the new One Percenters. They
stand against the literal 99%-plus of humans who ever bestrode the
planet, who never conceived of marriage as anything beyond man and
woman.
As
for those who disagree with me, and no longer support marriage as
reserved to one man and one woman – a redefinition which will ultimately
open the door to numerous new configurations -- I’d like to address you
politely with a point I’m sure you haven’t considered. Do I expect to
change your mind or those of Elena Kagan or Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the
wider culture? No, I don’t. America has entered a protracted phase of
post-Judeo-Christian thinking, where individualism and relativism reign
supreme, fostered by a steady stream of incredibly naïve parents who
marched their children in wide-eyed cadence through the educational
system at giant costs both financial and moral. Nothing short of a major
religious revival will save it. This culture and country will redefine
marriage, either this month or in the months and years ahead.
That
said, I would like to inform gay-marriage supporters of something they
haven’t considered. Here it goes, a brief summary of what I detail over a
couple hundred pages in Takedown:
Efforts
to fundamentally transform family and marriage have been long at work,
but never (until now) accepted and pushed by the mainstream. In the
past, these efforts were spearheaded by the most dangerous leftists. For
two centuries, leftist extremists made their arguments, from the 1800s
to the 1960s, beginning with the Communist Manifesto, where
Marx and Engels wrote of the “abolition of the family!” Efforts to
revolutionize family and marriage continued from socialist utopians like
Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Albert Brisbane, to cultural Marxists
in the Frankfurt School such as Herbert Marcuse and Freudian-Marxist
Wilhelm Reich, to 20th-century leftists and progressives ranging from
the Bolsheviks -- Lenin, Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai -- to Margaret
Sanger, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and ‘60s radicals like Bill Ayers,
Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd. When Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer ran a
“Red Family” colony in near Berkeley in the 1960s, they were merely
following the footsteps of socialist-utopian colonies in the 1800s in
places like Oneida, New York and New Harmony, Indiana.
Were
these “ideological colonists” (to borrow an apt description by Pope
Francis) supporting gay marriage? Of course, not. No group of radicals,
no matter how unhinged, ever contemplated that. The mere fleeting
contemplation, the mere momentary notion, the slightest passing fancy of
a man legally marrying another man in the 1850s or 1950s would have
been scoffed at as incomprehensible. Such proponents would have been
deemed certifiably insane. Public authorities might well have hauled
them away as menaces to society.
These
fundamental transformers did, however, seek to break down
natural-traditional-biblical boundaries for family and marriage. They
sought every means to reshape and redefine. They did so to the point
that now, today, the Communist Party USA, the People’s World, and even Castro’s Cuba,
not to mention leftist groups like the Beyond Marriage campaign, have
picked up their mantle and embraced gay marriage as the vehicle to
achieve what their leftist forbears were unable to achieve.
For
the far left, gay marriage is the Trojan horse to secure the takedown
of marriage it has long wanted, and countless everyday Americans are
oblivious to the older, deeper forces at work. And even more delicious
for the left, gay marriage is serving as a stunningly effective tool in
attacking what the far left has always hated most: religion.
In
a telling moment about a year ago, I received an email from a reader
who once had been part of the “gay left.” He told me that even most gay
people, who are either not political or nowhere near as political as the
extreme left, have no idea how their gay-marriage advocacy fits and
fuels the far left’s anti-family agenda, and specifically its longtime
take-down strategy aimed at the nuclear family. The emailer is exactly
right (and inspired me to begin collecting the material that led to this
book).
Indeed,
most of the gay people I have known are Republicans. Generally, I have
had no problem easily dialoguing with them, though it is getting more
difficult, as liberals have done their usual excellent job convincing an
entire group that I as a conservative hate them. Even when socially
liberal -- and, even then, mainly on matters like gay rights -- the gay
people I’ve met have been economic conservatives, not to mention
pro-life on abortion. But in signing on the dotted line for gay
marriage, they have also, whether they realize it or not, enlisted in
the radical left’s unyielding centuries-old attempt to undermine the
family. The same is true, ironically, for “conservatives” who support
gay marriage, for libertarians who worship a golden calf of “freedom”
that is fully separated from faith, and for the “moderates” swimming (as
they usually do) with the cultural tide.
Unlike
the communists who ripped marriage as “bourgeois claptrap,” as a form
of “slavery” and “vile patriarchy,” as a system of “captive housewives,”
and who forcibly collectivized children into full-time nurseries in
order to deliberately undermine the traditional family, the vast
majority of today’s proponents of same-sex marriage have friendly
motives. Their goal is not to tear down but to “expand” marriage to a
new form of spousal partner. They do this with the intent of providing a
new “freedom” and “right” to a new group of people. I get that.
Unfortunately, there’s so much that they are not getting.
Today’s
advocates of same-sex marriage need to be aware of the quite insidious
deeper historical-ideological forces they are unwittingly serving. Sure,
that knowledge still will likely not change their minds, but it’s
something that a well-informed, thoughtful person should at least be
willing to learn before urging the unprecedented action that our culture
and court may be about to take.
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