The goal
isn't equality - it's abolishing an institution.
Abolishing all civil
marriage is the primary goal of the elites who have been pushing same sex
marriage. The scheme called “marriage equality” is not an end in itself, and
never really has been. The LGBT agenda has spawned too many other
disparate agendas hostile to the existence of marriage, making marriage
“unsustainable,” if you will. By now we should be able to hear the growing
drumbeat to abolish civil marriage, as well as to legalize polygamy and all
manner of reproductive technologies.
Consider also the
breakneck speed at which the push for same sex marriage has been happening
recently. The agenda’s advocates have been very methodical in their
organization, disciplined in their timing, flush with money, in control of all
information outlets, including media, Hollywood, and academia. And perhaps most
telling is the smearing of any dissenter in the public square, a stigma made de
rigueur by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his animus-soaked opinion that repealed the
Defense of Marriage Act.
We’ve seen also how
the Obama Administration’s push for same sex marriage has occurred in lockstep
with policies that are hostile to marriage, such as the severe marriage penalty
written into Obamacare.
Activist judges have
taken their cues from Attorney General Eric Holder who used the DOMA repeal to
proclaim open season on any state that recognizes marriage as an organic (i.e.,
heterosexual) union of one man and one woman. In their crosshairs are state
constitutions, businesses, students, communities, churches, and all of those
bogus “conscience clauses” that were written into same sex marriage legislation
in order to sway wavering state legislators to vote “aye.”
The tipping point
came soon after certain big name conservatives and pundits swallowed the bait
on same sex marriage. Folks like Michael Barone, John Bolton, George Will,
S. E. Cupp, and David Blankenhorn have played a huge role in building momentum
for this movement, which, as we will see, is blazing a trail to the abolition
of state recognized marriage. And whether they know it or not, advocacy
for same sex marriage is putting a lot of statist machinery into motion.
Because once the state no longer has to recognize your marriage and family, the
state no longer has to respect the existence of your marriage and family.
Without civil
marriage, the family can no longer exist autonomously and serve as a wall of separation
between the individual and the state. This has huge implications for the
survival of freedom of association.
The notion of
marriage equality was never about marriage or about equality. It’s all
about the wrapping paper. It’s been packaged as an end in itself, but it
is principally just a means to a deeper end. It is the means by which
marriage extinction – the true target — can be achieved. If marriage and
family are permitted to exist autonomously, power can be de-centralized in
society. So the family has always been a thorn in the side of central
planners and totalitarians. The connection between its abolition and the
limitless growth of the state should be crystal clear. So anyone who has
bought into this movement, or is tempted to do so, would want to step back and
take a harder look.
Six
Indicators We’re Headed Directly for Abolishing Civil Marriage
We can sort out six
developments that indicate we’re on the fast track to abolishing civil
marriage. They include: 1) The blueprint for abolishing family, developed
by the founder of feminist legal theory, Martha Fineman; 2) support and
advocacy of Fineman’s model by facilitators and regulators in the Obama
Administration; 3) the statements of prominent LGBT activists themselves,
including their 2006 manifesto which in effect established the abolition of
marriage as the goal of the same sex marriage movement; 4) the demographic
shift to single rather than married households; 5) the growing shift in social
climate from marriage equality to marriage hostility; and 6) the recent push to
export the LGBT agenda globally, particularly targeting poor and developing
nations of Africa.
1) The Gender
Theorist Model: Replace civil marriage with government-regulated contractual
relationships
Collectivist style parenting
may still seem like the stuff of science fiction to a lot of folks, but the
ground for it has softened a lot since Hillary Clinton’s 1996 treatise It
Takes a Village and American Federation of Teachers president Sandra
Feldman’s 1998 op-ed “The Childswap Society.” We
now have MSNBC anchor Melissa Harris-Perry
declaring open war on traditional families by announcing “We have to break
through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids
belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
She envisages that the State will fill
the vacuum left by the abolition of family.
The abolition of
marriage and family has been a longtime project of gender theorists. Among
them is internationally renown feminist law theorist Martha Albertson Fineman
whose 2004 book The Autonomy Myth
argues strenuously for “the abolition of marriage as a legal category.” Her
treatise is breathtaking in its brazen approach to ending family autonomy and
privacy.
Fineman advocates for
a system that would unavoidably result in the regulation of personal
relationships through legal contracts. “Contract,” she writes “is an appealing
metaphor with which to consider social and political arrangements. It
imagines autonomous adults” hashing out the terms, etc. Yet she envisages
that the State will fill the vacuum left by the abolition of family [emphasis
added]:
“. . . in addition to
contract rules, I anticipate that ameliorating doctrines would fill the void
left by the abolition of this aspect of family law. In fact, it seems apparent
to me that a lot more regulation (protection) would occur once interactions
between individuals within families were removed from behind the veil of
privacy that now shields them.”
Fineman operates on
the apparent assumption that family privacy serves no purpose other than to
afford institutional protection for men behaving badly. Her prescription is
sweeping: “Once the institutional protection [is] removed, behavior would be
judged by standards established to regulate interactions among all members
of society.” [emphasis added]
There you have
it. All of your social interactions judged by certain
standards. Standards established by whom? The state. And lest our
eyes glaze over at mention of it, we ought to think of the State for what it
really is: a hierarchy of cliques, with one dominant clique at the
top. (Think mean girls in charge of everything and everyone.)
Fineman replaces the
word “spouse” with the term “sexual affiliate,” because, she professes, what we
think of as “family” should be defined by its function, not its form. In other
words, only “caretaker-dependent relationships” would be recognized in the
sense that “family” is recognized today.
So the abolition of
marriage, according to Fineman:
“would mean that
sexual affiliates (formerly labeled husband and wife) would be regulated by the
terms of their individualized agreements, with no special rules governing
fairness and no unique review or monitoring of the negotiation process.”
Feel better?
Fineman also states approvingly that:
“if the family is
defined functionally, focused on the caretaker-dependent relationship, the
traditionally problematic interactions of sexual affiliates (formerly
designated “spouses”) are not protected by notions of family privacy.”
Indeed, no
interaction could be protected by “notions of family privacy” in Fineman’s
model. She elaborated further and more recently on all of this in an October 2013 article in the
Chicago-Kent Law Review.
2) Friends in
High Places promote Fineman’s Model of State-Regulated Contracts
Cass Sunstein, who
served as President Obama’s regulatory czar from 2009 to 2012, has advocated
strongly for the abolition of civil marriage and its replacement with contracts
that would negotiate the terms of personal relationships.
In 2008 Sunstein
published an article in the Cardozo Law Review arguing
that there is no constitutional right to marry and suggesting that “states may
abolish marriage without offending the Constitution.” And an entire chapter of
a popular book Sunstein co-authored with Richard Thaler in 2008 is devoted to
arguing for the abolition of civil marriage. This is from Nudge: Improving Decisions About
Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
“Under our proposal,
the word marriage would no longer appear in any laws, and marriage licenses
would no longer be offered or recognized by any level of government. . .
. Under our approach, the only legal status states would confer on couples
would be a civil union, which would be a domestic partnership agreement between
any two people.*(*Footnote: We duck the question of whether civil unions
can involve more than two people.)”
Sunstein and Thaler
dub their approach “libertarian paternalism,” an odd jargon which seems
contrived to win over readers by evoking a strange juxtaposition of moderation
and a heavy touch of the archaic.
Clearly, Sunstein has
been laying the groundwork for the abolition of civil marriage. He purports
that this would get the government out of a “licensing scheme,” but his
specious phrasing is a fig leaf covering up the predictable effects of his
approach: greater government regulation of personal relationships. His popular
writing on the subject comes in the guise of “privatization” of relationships –
even as gender theorists like Fineman argue against America’s “obsession” with
privacy and individualism. But this is not a difficult circle to square. Thaler
and Sunstein argue, pretty much in line with Fineman, that people ought to make
use of contracts to define the terms of their relationships. And contracts
invite – indeed, for Fineman, they demand – that the government function as an
intimate partner in this legal ménage a trois.
3) LGBT Activists Say
So Themselves: The Goal is to Abolish Marriage
“Gay marriage is a
lie,” announced gay activist
Masha Gessen in a panel discussion last year
at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. “Fighting for gay marriage generally involves
lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there.”
[Applause.] “It’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not
exist.”
Gessen was merely
echoing a message from an LGBT manifesto of 2006 called Beyond
Same Sex Marriage. The manifesto is a blatant rallying cry to bring
about a post-marriage society, one in which there is no room for
state-recognized marriage.
“It’s a no-brainer that the institution
of marriage should not exist.”
Ethics and Public
Policy Institute scholar Stanley Kurtz wrote extensively about this document in
two National Review articles, entitled The Confession and The Confession II. Kurtz
noted that the intent of the sponsors of the manifesto – which as of 2006 had
hundreds of prominent signatories, including Cornel West, Barbara Ehrenreich,
Martha Fineman, and Gloria Steinem – was “to dissolve marriage by extending the
definition to every conceivable family type.”
Sunstein needn’t have
“ducked the issue” of more than two parties in a domestic contract because
legalizing polygamy is central to the manifesto. And there can be no doubt that
the legalization of polygamy would result in the abolition of all
state-recognized marriage. Polygamy — repackaged in the now trendy term
“polyamory” – comes with an array of configurations too dizzying and with too
many moving parts to be sustained as state-recognized marriage.
Despite the existence
of the manifesto, the official line of the LGBT community still seems to be
that gay marriage is only about equal rights for couples who love one another.
Their spokespersons have been disciplined – with a friendly media running cover
for them – in maintaining the official line so as not to provoke a debate about
the real agenda to abolish marriage.
Supposedly
conservative gay activists like Jonathan Rauch have also run cover and
protected the timing of the agenda by claiming that the manifesto was merely a
“fringe” of the LGBT movement. It’s irrelevant whether or not Rauch really
believes his own propaganda that gay marriage will somehow strengthen a
marriage culture by bringing loving gay couples into it. The main effect of the
Rauch meme is to accelerate the abolition of civil marriage by hastening a
legal framework for genderless marriage that will pave the way for total
abolition of civil marriage, and with it private family life.
It’s clear the gloves
are coming off and timing has entered a new phase. The push for polyamory has
gone mainstream, right on schedule. Supportive puff pieces on it are popping up
in places like Atlantic Monthly and the
erstwhile women’s magazine Redbook. In the end,
polyamory serves only as a transitory way station between the legalization of
same sex marriage and the abolition of civil marriage.
4) Growing Dominance
of Singles
Recent decades have
seen a sharp upsurge of unmarried households. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2012
there were 103 million unmarried people 18 and older. That’s 44 percent of all
US residents over 18. And 62 percent of those 103 million had never been
married. Unmarried individuals represented 56 million households in 2012. The
rise in singles has had an undeniably huge impact on the electorate. In the
2012 election 39 percent of the voters were unmarried, compared to 24 percent
of the voters in the 1972 election.
The “Communication
League for Unmarried Equality,” is a coalition of singles’ rights organizations
which argues that government benefits for marriage – including tax breaks and
survivor benefits in social security — amount to marital status discrimination.
Its advocates argue that civil marriage unjustly awards financial, social, and
cultural benefits to married individuals at the expense of unmarried
individuals who end up subsidizing marriage and children, without
compensation. In addition, proponents of “unmarried equality” insist that
the existence of these privileges serve to perpetuate prejudices and
stereotypes about singles that inflict harm on them. (Sounds like a Supreme
Court case brewing.)
Bella DePaulo
spearheaded the movement as a blogger and author of Singled Out and Singlism:
What it is, Why it Matters and How to Stop It.” According to DePaulo, the
discrimination she calls “singlism” may seem more subtle than racism or sexism,
but is just as damaging. She has tip-toed to the edge of advocating for the
abolition of marriage, with a professor of feminist philosophy Elizabeth Blake,
by saying that marriage should be “minimized” (for now) so
that singles have the same benefits as married individuals. Which, naturally,
means abolishing marriage.
“Singlism” itself is
not yet considered a form of illegal discrimination. But DePaulo believes it should
be:
“Because singlism is
built right into American laws, it is not possible to be single and not
be a target of discrimination. If you have followed the marriage equality
debate, then you probably know that there are more than 1,000 federal laws that
benefit or protect only those people who are legally married. Even if same-sex
marriage becomes legal throughout the land, all those people who are single —
whether gay or straight or any other status — will still remain second class
citizens.”
5) Morphing of the
Memes – from Marriage Equality to Marriage Ambivalence to Marriage Hostility
“Why would anyone get
married?” That’s a quote from Nancy Pelosi in
a Valentine’s Day interview last month,
downplaying the importance of marriage. While some might say she’s simply
courting the singles demographic, she’s mostly reinforcing and echoing a
narrative that marriage is irrelevant or perhaps even harmful. She is
contributing to the drumbeat to abolish civil marriage.
Let’s not forget Julia, the mascot of
Obama’s reelection campaign who serves as a Stepford wife to the State.
Major cultural forces
– the media, academia, and Hollywood – have already adopted an increasingly
hostile view of marriage. We can see it in the use of the term “greedy
marrieds” from a recent New York Times feature “The Changing American Family“: “Single people
live alone and proudly consider themselves families of one — more generous and
civic-minded than ‘greedy marrieds.’”
And look at NBC
Sports in its coverage Olympic gold medalist skier
David Wise. It described him as living an “alternative lifestyle”
because he happened to be young and married with children. The clear
inference was that he was abnormal.
The promotion and
glorification of single parenting which got its start with the Murphy Brown TV
series of the 1990s has gone into hyper drive now. Check out online services
such as Modamily, that matches people with “parenting
partners,” with whom they can draw up a contract, arrange for artificial
reproductive technologies, and forgo marriage.
And let’s not forget Julia, the mascot of Obama’s reelection campaign
who serves, with more than a bit of irony, as a Stepford wife to the State. The
narrative was clearly hostile to the idea of marriage and supportive of
policies to abolish it.
6) LGBT Push for Same
Sex Marriage in Developing Countries
The rush by LGBT
activists and the Obama administration to lift bans on gay marriage in all 50
states is peculiarly fast and furious. Oddly so for a movement that seems to be
gaining steam and social compliance. A reasonable question would be: What’s the
rush if things are going so swimmingly your way? The only answer seems to be
one of fragile timing.
The sudden LGBT push
globally, especially in Africa, should give us
pause as well. Why the abrupt shove into poor countries, threatening to cut off
aid unless they comply with such a massive cultural shift and adopt the Western
LGBT agenda? Why the laser focus on Uganda and Malawi instead of places like
Iran where abuses of homosexuals are likely just as common?
We are witnessing a
major strategy to export gay marriage – and all it entails for the abolition of
marriage — worldwide. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have made an
example of Uganda by threatening to cut off its aid over the existence of its
anti-sodomy laws. Other developing nations are expected to take note and fall
into line, creating a cascade effect until any other nation who resists will
feel the noose tightening.
We might reasonably
ask why this particular agenda is getting so much attention while the world
goes to hell in a hand basket. Syria is overrun with vicious terrorist gangs at
least as bad as its president. Russia is flexing its muscles, having just
invaded the Ukraine and Crimea. Christians are being exterminated in record
numbers throughout the Middle East. We’re looking at nuclear weapons in Iran.
There’s a nuclear threat from North Korea, which not only starves its own
people but is run by a guy who, it was said, feeds his political enemies to
starving dogs. And yet President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have been
spending special quality time focusing on the LGBT agenda in in the poor
countries of Africa?
Clearly the Western
LGBT agenda represents a new brand of cultural imperialism that is not content
to shape life at home, but intends to propagate itself – and all it entails – worldwide.
Ending Marriage Leads
To A Centralized All Powerful State
The hard push for
marriage equality was never about marriage. Neither was it about equality. It’s
a convenient vehicle to abolish civil marriage, whether to rid the world of
paternalism, evade responsibility for children, “privatize” relationships, or
whatever. Abolishing marriage strips the family of its autonomy by placing it
much more directly under the regulating control of the state.
Once the state no
longer has to recognize the marriage relationship and its presumption of
privilege and privacy, we all become atomized individuals in the eyes of the
state, officially strangers to one another. We lose the space – the buffer zone
– that the institution of the natural, organic family previously gave us and
that forced the state to keep its distance.
Isn’t it ironic that
feminists would replace the “paternalism” of marriage (what happened to strong
women?) with the new paternalism of state regulation of personal relationships?
Isn’t it ironic that singles in this scheme of things simply end up marrying
the state?
At some point, we
must conclude that freedom of association has its source in state acceptance of
the core family as the primary buffer zone between the individual and the
state. There is no escaping this fact, no matter a particular generation’s
attitude or public opinion polling, or advances in medical technology, or whatever
else comes our way.
Marriage Is The
Template For Freedom Of Association
Without state
recognition of – and respect for – marriage, can freedom of association
survive? How so? On what basis?
Civil marriage
provides the entire basis for presuming the rights and responsibilities of
biological parents to raise their own children. It also assumes the right of
spouses to refuse to testify against one another in court. It presumes
survivorship – in guardianship of children as well as inheritance of property.
If we abolish civil marriage, these will no longer be rights by default, but
rights to be distributed at the pleasure of a bureaucratic state.
When a couple enters
into a civil marriage, they are not inviting the government into their
relationship, but rather putting the government on notice that they are a
family unit. It’s the couple – not the state – that’s in the driver’s
seat.Otherwise, they needn’t marry. Otherwise, central planners wouldn’t be so
intent on abolishing marriage as a private and autonomous association from
which the state must keep its distance, unless one partner wishes to exit by
divorce.
Children – i.e., all
of us born into a family – inherit that presumption of autonomy and broadcast
it into society. We do so whether or not we ever get married ourselves. The
presumption of family autonomy and privacy informs our right to freely
associate with others – through romances, friendships, business contracts, and
so on. It would be catastrophic to freedom if we threw it away.
State recognition of
this autonomy cannot exist without state recognition of marriage. In fact,
traditional marriage — just like traditional oxygen if you will – helps all of
society breathe more freely.
If civil marriage is
abolished, you can say hello to the government at your bedroom door because
that comfortable little meme about “getting the state out of the marriage
business” will have flown out your bedroom window while you were sleeping.
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