I’ve been inside a psychiatric hospital only once in my life (note to my detractors: as a visitor, not a patient). Reading The Times editorial For Gay Marriage enabled me to relive that eerie experience.
It’s not only that I disagree with the views expressed in the article, though I do have a tendency, much and justly decried by my friends, to presuppose intellectual deficiency on the part of my opponents. However, over many years I’ve learned to consider the other man’s well-argued opinion as valid, if ill-advised. In fact, I’m constantly reminded of that great adman who always wore a lapel pin saying ‘Maybe he’s right’.
But whoever wrote that editorial isn’t just wrong — he is mad. When sane people argue a case, they do so by looking at the evidence, analysing it, finding logical links and amalgamating the lot into a coherent point of view. They eschew ignorant, emotive, grossly biased non sequiturs — of the kind this editorial flashes in every line.
‘[Gay marriage] is a cause that has the firm support of The Times,’ it says, because ‘to allow same-sex couples to marry would enrich an historic institution and expand the sum of human happiness.’
This is insane twaddle. Governments have been instituted among men not to create a paradise on earth but to prevent hell on earth. Five millennia of recorded history show that this is only ever achieved by pursuing not happiness — whatever it means, which isn’t much — but justice, social cohesion and, as Edmund Burke put it, prudence, prescription and prejudice. (The last word is getting rotten press from the PC set, but to Burke it simply meant the intuitive knowledge shared by most people — effectively what makes a nation a nation.)
It has been understood from time immemorial that one man’s happiness is another man’s misery. Pursuit of happiness, enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, is an Enlightenment construct that, in order to mean anything at all, has to be qualified in so many ways as to make any sane person question the validity of the term altogether.
Otherwise one could suggest all sorts of absurd ways in which ‘the sum of human happiness’ could be ‘expanded’. Legalised necrophilia, zoophilia, money laundering, driving without a licence, shoplifting — all these would add no end to the number of happy individuals, thereby achieving the expansion so dear to the warped heart of The Times. They would also knock stones of different sizes out of the foundations of our society.
Marriage, a union of a man and a woman sanctioned by the state and, ideally, blessed by God, is a building block not just of society but indeed of the human race. It’s also a natural competitor to the power of the state. That’s why all tyrannical states in history sought to undermine marriage or even to do away with it.
One of the first acts of the bolsheviks in Russia was to abolish marriage, and Inessa Armand, Lenin’s mistress, likened sex to ‘drinking a glass of water’ (for the sake of the Great Leader’s reputation, one hopes she didn’t mean drinking it in one quick gulp). To the same end, the bolsheviks also legalised homosexuality. Thus the first country to make homosexuality legal was Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1934, a time and place not otherwise known for worshipping human rights. And the Nazis reduced marriage to a gruesome exercise in eugenics, augmented by SS stud farms and euthanasia.
It’s a lamentable fact that Western governments are gravitating towards totalitarianism as well, what with the individual becoming less and less powerful and the state more and more so. And though today’s governments wouldn’t dare abolish marriage altogether, they too have a burning need to take it apart piece by piece.
Ye shall know them by their fruits: statistics in this case don’t lie. Today as many people get married in Britain as did in the 1890s, when the population was half of today’s. In 1950 there were 408,000 marriages in Britain and 33,000 divorces. The corresponding numbers for 2000 are 306,000 and 155,000 — in a larger population, there were fewer marriages, and more than twice as many divorces. Almost 50 percent of all children in the UK are born outside marriage, which usually means they grow up fatherless — with all the well-documented consequences that don’t fall far short of a social, cultural and educational collapse.
Now the government strives to redefine the very concept of marriage the better to destroy it — sorry, ‘to enrich an historic institution.’ Dave wants to do it ‘because he’s a conservative’. Nick wants to do it because he’s a LibDem. Both want to do it because they sense in their statist viscera that, unless marriage is destroyed, their spivocratic power will never become absolute. A stable marriage is likely to keep the man, the woman and their children out of the clutches of the state — they are less likely to become its dependents and therefore more likely to reject its dictates. That just won’t do, will it now, Dave and Nick?
And why stop there in our quest for equality? Commendably, Dave and Nick aren’t sexist but they are still specist. I’m awaiting their unequivocal support of marriage between humans and other mammals. As that too would expand the sum of human happiness, they’d be able to count on The Times as a staunch ally.
‘Reforms to marital law need to be informed by a sense of history, lest they give rise to unintended and damaging consequences,’ continues The Times, as if deadset on proving that it has indeed gone bonkers. Surely any sane person would see that homomarriage isn’t ‘informed by a sense of history’? And surely no one blessed with such a sense would dismiss as antiquated irrelevances the strong protests coming from the leaders of both principal Christian confessions in Britain? That sentence, appearing as it does amid a strident clamour for same-sex marriage, can be used for diagnostic purposes by any competent psychiatrist.
The history of Britain and her realm is inseparable from the church as the guardian and teacher of public morality. The more effectively does the church act in that capacity, the greater the moral health of the nation. An agnostic may question that this is the case. An atheist may even oppose this or that tenet of Judaeo-Christian morality. But, regardless of his faith or lack thereof, anyone with a secure grasp on historical reality will see that every attempt to replace Judaeo-Christian morality with anything else has invariably produced untold misery.
I feel sad every time a venerable British institution bites the dust. The Times has been moving to perdition for quite some time now. Its circulation is now merely eighth in Britain, having declined from 726,349 in 2000 to 405,113 today. A few more editorials like this, and it’ll dwindle away to nothing. Sorry to see that happening.