The deconstructionist project of same-sex “marriage”
“When they undertake to redefine marriage to accommodate same-sex partnerships, politicians are making war on biology. They might as well attempt to launch a war on the stars.”
By Gary Scarrabelotti
The Australian Labor Party is suffering from a phenomenon we’ve seen a lot of since the French Revolution: the madness of the revolutionary enterprise.
What defines this peculiar species of madness is the belief that the world can, and should, be turned upside down. In the present case, the ALP – or at least a powerful movement within it — is proposing to turn human biology inside out.
Invoking a post-modernist language of human rights, the state branches of the ALP have been signing up, one-by-one, to same-sex marriage. The stage is now set for Labor to back a revolutionary change to the meaning of marriage at its next federal conference, due in Sydney in December this year.
Beginning in Tasmania in July 2009, the drive for same-sex marriage has swept up the South Australian, Queensland, and now Australian Capital Territory branches of the ALP.
Stretching language and logic beyond their limits, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh proclaimed on 20 June this year that same-sex marriage was a matter of “basic human rights”.
This raises a couple of questions. How can one have a right to attempt the impossible: namely, overturning the irreducible facts of human biology? And, what kind of party will the ALP become in its attempt to do the impossible?
Marriage is not a mere “cultural artefact” reconfigurable at will into new shapes and meanings. The “culture” of marriage is founded on an elemental “given” of human biology.
Marriage is for “unsame” sexes only. This is because men and women can be joined, in a complementary bodily union, only to their gender opposites, and by an embrace whose primary biological purpose is to give birth to new human beings.
The sexual union of a man and a woman, by its very nature, is directed inescapably toward the begetting of children; and this remains so even if this reality is obscured by the natural waning of the biological cycles, by chronic infertility, by the intentions of the sexual partners and, especially today, by the widespread use of contraceptives.
There is no escaping the way the human body is made. There is no way around the fact that male and female bodies are designed to join with each other and that the biological reason for this union is reproduction. The fact that the reproductive act is accompanied by a mysterious personal union of the sexual partners which can transcend their individuality – and that his union is much sought after for itself — does not diminish, reduce, or remove the reproductive biological underpinnings of sexual concourse between a man and a woman.
Since sexual acts between members of the same sex can never have – or achieve – this foundational propagatory character, the sexual encounters between such people cannot take on the character of a marital act. In fine, marriage between same-sex partners is impossible.
Squaring the circle
When Anna Bligh was attempting to square the circle by proclaiming same-sex marriage as a human right, did she spare a thought for the pre-existing rights of children? This is the right of children to be intimately connected with, and nurtured by, the fathers and mothers whose conjugal acts brought them to life.
It is in the nature of revolutions that the acquisition of new rights by a rising class of claimants almost always involves the obliteration of some already established rights. And this is no less the case in this instance. Whether they understand it or not, Bligh and the cohorts of Labor social revolutionaries are attacking the right of children to form their identities within the context of a family constituted by a man and a woman and their biological progeny.
That some families are dysfunctional, that some children lose their parents through death, that others become disconnected from them through family breakdown, are fostered out, or given up for adoption, does not diminish the principle that the proper place for a child to be is within a family formed around its genetic parents. An imperfect world does not nullify rights and duties – and, more importantly it does not turn them into their opposites.
What does it say about a political party that attempts such a bizarre experiment and to proclaim it progress?
This is not, obviously, a question only for the ALP. It is a question for political parties of every colour and their adherents.
When they undertake to redefine marriage to accommodate same-sex partnerships, politicians are making war on biology. They might as well attempt to launch a war on the stars. The unalterable verities will not change, but a great deal of damage will be done in the attempt to force them.
Such a project necessarily engages its proponents in an assault upon those cultures that accept the existential realities and whose religions have sanctified them with a deep veneration. This is a very strange development, especially in a political class self-consciously devoted to the worship of multiculturalism and a culturally colour-blind immigration policy.
Perhaps it tells us something about multiculturalism in practice. Alleged to be prompted by a reverence for every man, woman and child, for their languages, cultures, and religions, in practice all of them are regarded with equal condescension if not contempt. And nowhere better can this be seen than in the present attempt to impose on a so-called “multicultural” society the bizarre social experiments of a largely white European cosmopolitan élite.
Secularist radicals
So the ALP, and other like-minded marriage revolutionaries, are transforming themselves into radical secularists viscerally at odds with tradition and the long-established civilisations of East and West. The advocacy of same-sex marriage adopted by our political leadership is, however, deeply hostile above all (at least by implication) to the old Judeo-Christian values upon which Australia and its most important institutions have been founded.
Overthrowing the meaning of marriage, therefore, will be very bad news for two groups of people.
First, and most importantly, for children who will be reduced to little more than chattel property intended to provide authentic domestic decoration in same-sex households.
Secondly, in the gun will be the advocates of the Judeo-Christian tradition, principally responsible until now for transmitting to Australian society, the concepts of marriage and family presently under attack.
A same-sex marriage law, as a practical necessity, requires, if not immediately then very probably later, the support of a Bill of Rights and (or) anti-vilification laws so drafted as to suppress criticism of this bogus “state of marriage” and refusals to condone or support it by any means. Where that odd-ball country Canada has gone, Australia will be driven to follow.
What happens to a society that deconstructs marriage and erects in its place a new institution never before seen in human history? Perhaps it will lose its legitimacy: perhaps the “mandate of heaven” will pass to others.
Standing at the opening of an age set to become more religious — and by inference more traditional and naturalistic – a large section of the ALP, the Greens in their entirety, and a good slice of the Liberals all seem to be saying they want no part of the future.
Perhaps their wish will be granted.