By Mark Steyn
Gay
marriage? It came up at dinner Down Under this time last year, and the
prominent Aussie politician on my right said matter-of-factly, “It’s not
about expanding marriage, it’s about destroying marriage.”
That would be the most obvious explanation as to why the same
societal groups who assured us in the Seventies that marriage was either
(a) a “meaningless piece of paper” or (b) institutionalized rape are
now insisting it’s a universal human right. They’ve figured out what,
say, terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayers did — that, when it comes to
destroying core civilizational institutions, trying to blow them up is
less effective than hollowing them out from within.
On the other hand, there are those who argue it’s a victory for
the powerful undertow of bourgeois values over the surface ripples of
sexual transgressiveness: Gays will now be as drearily suburban as the
rest of us. A couple of years back, I saw a picture in the paper of two
chubby old queens tying the knot at City Hall in Vancouver, and the
thought occurred that Western liberalism had finally succeeded in boring
all the fun out of homosexuality.
Which of these alternative scenarios — the demolition of marriage or
the taming of the gay — will come to pass? Most likely, both. In the
upper echelons of society, our elites practice what they don’t preach.
Scrupulously nonjudgmental about everything except traditional Christian
morality, they nevertheless lead lives in which, as Charles Murray
documents in his book Coming Apart, marriage is still expected
to be a lifelong commitment. It is easy to see moneyed gay newlyweds
moving into such enclaves, and making a go of it. As the Most Reverend
Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide
Anglican Communion, said just before his enthronement the other day,
“You see gay relationships that are just stunning in the quality of the
relationship.” “Stunning”: What a fabulous endorsement! But, amongst the
type of gay couple that gets to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury,
he’s probably right.
Lower down the socioeconomic scale, the quality gets more variable.
One reason why conservative appeals to protect the sacred procreative
essence of marriage have gone nowhere is because Americans are rapidly
joining the Scandinavians in doing most of their procreating without
benefit of clergy. Seventy percent of black babies are born out of
wedlock, so are 53 percent of Hispanics (the “natural conservative
constituency” du jour, according to every lavishly remunerated
Republican consultant), and 70 percent of the offspring of poor white
women. Over half the babies born to mothers under 30 are now
“illegitimate” (to use a quaintly judgmental formulation). For the first
three-and-a-half centuries of American settlement the bastardy rate (to
be even quainter) was a flat line in the basement of the graph, stuck
at 2 or 3 percent all the way to the eve of the Sixties. Today over 40
percent of American births are “non-marital,” which is significantly
higher than Canada or Germany. “Stunning” upscale gays will join what’s
left of the American family holed up in a chichi Green Zone, while
beyond the perimeter the vast mounds of human rubble pile up
remorselessly. The conservative defense of marriage rings hollow because
for millions of families across this land the American marriage is
hollow.
If the Right’s case has been disfigured by delusion, the Left’s has
been marked by a pitiful parochialism. At the Supreme Court this week,
Ted Olson, the former solicitor general, was one of many to invoke
comparisons with Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case that struck
down laws prohibiting interracial marriage. But such laws were never
more than a localized American perversion of marriage. In almost all
other common-law jurisdictions, from the British West Indies to
Australia, there was no such prohibition. Indeed, under the Raj, it’s
estimated that one in three British men in the Indian subcontinent took a
local wife. “Miscegenation” is a 19th-century American neologism. When
the Supreme Court struck down laws on interracial marriage, it was not
embarking on a wild unprecedented experiment but merely restoring the
United States to the community of civilized nations within its own legal
tradition. Ted Olson is a smart guy, but he sounded like Mary-Kate and
Ashley’s third twin in his happy-face banalities last week.
Yet, beyond the Court, liberal appeals to “fairness” are always the
easiest to make. Because, for too much of its history, this country was
disfigured by halfwit rules about who can sit where on public
transportation and at lunch counters, the default position of most
Americans today is that everyone should have the right to sit anywhere:
If a man self-identifies as a woman and wants to sit on the ladies’
toilet, where’s the harm? If a woman wants to be a soldier and sit in a
foxhole in the Hindu Kush, sure, let her. If a mediocre high-school
student wants to sit in a college class, that’s only fair. American
“rights” have taken on the same vapid character as grade-school sports:
Everyone must be allowed to participate, and everyone is entitled to the
same participation ribbon.
Underneath all this apparent “fairness” is a lot of unfairness. Entire
new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse,
like the legions of adolescent daughters abused by Mom’s latest live-in
boyfriend. Millions of children are now raised in transient households
that make not just economic opportunity but even elementary
character-formation all but impossible. In the absence of an agreed
moral language to address this brave new world, Americans retreat to
comforting euphemisms like “blended families,” notwithstanding that the
familial Cuisinart seems to atomize at least as often as it blends.
Meanwhile, social mobility declines: Doctors who once married
their nurses now marry their fellow doctors; lawyers who once married
their secretaries now contract with fellow super-lawyers, like dynastic
unions in medieval Europe. Underneath the self-insulating elite,
millions of Americans are downwardly mobile: The family farmers and mill
workers, the pioneers who hacked their way into the wilderness and
built a township, could afford marriage and children; indeed, it was an
economic benefit. For their descendants doing minimum-wage service jobs
about to be rendered obsolete by technology, functioning families are a
tougher act, and children an economic burden. The gays looked at
contemporary marriage and called the traditionalists’ bluff.
Modern Family works well on TV, less so in the rusting
double-wides of decrepit mill towns where, very quickly, the accumulated
social capital of two centuries is drained, and too much is too
wrecked. In Europe, where dependency, decadence, and demographic decline
are extinguishing some of the oldest nations on earth, a successor
population is already in place in the restive Muslim housing projects.
With their vibrant multicultural attitudes to feminism and
homosexuality, there might even be a great sitcom in it: Pre-Modern Family — and, ultimately, post-Modern.
“Fiscal conservatives” recoil from this kind of talk like homophobes
at a bathhouse: The sooner some judge somewhere takes gay marriage off
the table the sooner the right can go back to talking about debt and
Obamacare without being dismissed as uptight theocratic bigots. But it
doesn’t work like that. Most of the social liberalism comes with quite a
price tag. The most reliable constituency for Big Government is single
women, for whom the state is a girl’s best friend, the sugar daddy whose
checks never bounce. A society in which a majority of births are out of
wedlock cannot be other than a Big Government welfare society. Ruining a
nation’s finances is one thing; debauching its human capital is far
harder to fix.
SoRo: I differ with Mr Steyn on SSM, agree with him on most other issues, but always love his writing.
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