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Federal parliament’s gay horsemen of the apocalypse — well, actually, the gay horsemen and Warren Entsch — had seemed determined to pass legislation that would allow same-sex marriage, a gambit aimed at by-passing the possibility that the very people the Coalition promised hand-on-heart would have a say in the matter might not vote in a plebiscite they way activists would wish. The Liberal party room’s decision yesterday to try its luck once more in the Senate should take some of the heat out of demands that the matter be put to an immediate parliamentary vote, at least in the short term.
But given the near-certainty of rejection in the Upper House, that muting cannot be expected to last. When the cries for “equality” resume, the debate will once again be pitched from two fundamentally different points of view. One side invokes group rights and equality, the other focuses on the destruction of marriage by changing its long-accepted definition and essential meaning. That meaning, rooted in the law of nature and understood by communities and societies all over the world for thousands of years, is of a contract both unitive and procreative between one man and one woman and for life. The antagonists are talking about different things, and generally talking past one another.
What Australia’s gay community thinks about all this, no one really knows. The advocates’ television ads express one body of opinion, but think back to the Seventies and the early years of gay liberation and you just have to wonder. In those days, the notion that this notoriously non-monogamous lot would end up wanting to marry one another would have been astonishing. Back then, many advocating the gay cause were part of the kill-off-marriage brigade, decrying matrimony in chorus with a faction of the women’s liberation crowd as exploitive and subjugating. This is the core argument of the traditionalists – that it is not so much garden-variety homosexuals but “homosexualists” who want to smash all vestiges of Judeo-Christian doctrine while simultaneously sealing the deal for secular materialism and relativism.
But there is another angle in this debate, one seldom articulated: heterosexuals among us have done a damned fine job of killing marriage in practice. The homosexualists are merely finishing the chore by setting out to kill marriage in theory. For all intents and purposes, marriage might reasonably considered already dead in the water.
How did this happen?
Well, it all started with broad, easy and cheap access to the Pill. Whatever this did for women’s rights, it essentially delivered risk-free adultery, made the world “safe” for cheating. Next came easy and affordable, guilt-free divorce, while the social changes of the Swingin’ Sixties erased the stigma formerly associated with unwed motherhood. Blended families and single-parent families became entirely unremarkable. Meanwhile, we gave up on religion and all that fuddy-duddy morality stuff. Marriage, what was it about anyway? It wasn’t “for life” anymore, and it certainly wasn’t a precondition of procreation. “Marriage” in its traditional meaning, for its traditional purposes, withered long before gay activists launched their current campaign.
Whatever damage we as individuals and as a society have inflicted upon marriage as an institution these past fifty years — with our worship of indiscriminate “tolerance”, our adulteries, our fatherless families, our serial monogamies (one marriage after another), our blended families, our single mums with rotating casts of live-in boyfriends — the ultimate question is whether there remains something left to be saved, something worth fighting for against the best and worst efforts of the homosexualists.
I hope there is, but I’m not optimistic.
A very valid point, Paul, well put in simple, straightforward terms. Notwithstanding that, the homosexual lobby lacks even the slightest vestige of integrity and credibility and as it happens, it is not a bona fide representative of the bulk of gay people in Australia, most of whom couldn’t care less for marriage or any sort of committed relationship and are rather displeased with the resentment stirred up in society at large by the belligerent behaviour of their supposed “champions”.
You have hit the nail on the head. Marriage has been co-opted by the State and degraded. A lot of activists push the line that is purely a secular issue but they are being disingenuous. Marriage is an area where religion and the State overlap. Giving unmarried couples the same legal rights as a marriage was a big step in the wrong direction. It is interesting that the USA still has a clear distinction in this regard.
I’m bored to death with this topic and the Waffen SSM in toto. No more reading on this so-called topic for me in future.
We’ve slipped a fair way downhill from the standard, but we still know what the standard is.
Paul
The pill was the single biggest change experienced by all civilisations since the Egyptians.
It allowed westerners to control their reproduction. The first civilisation to effectively do so since the Egyptians and their use of spermicides.
It has produced an era of greatest western freedom.
No longer are we dominated by church or men.
This has caused problems today.
1. Rejection of monotheism has resulted in a search for another higher authority.
2. The void is being filled by Marxist stupidity.
3. And Attempts to repudiate all western values.
We are yet to really address the change in relationships and attendant moralities since the introduction of the pill.
Jermaine Greer came closest.
When our writers and poets start exploring this theme will be
the start.
Marriage is indeed in question but on the evidence it isn’t the foundation of a successful civilisation.
The Egyptians did not have marriage. They entered into relationships with contracts. ie they expected them to be temporary, from the start.
Their civilisation is thought to have existed, successfully, for 6000 years and only died after the advent of monothesism.
They too were highly promiscuous.
Now there is a radical thought.
Germaine Greer. Were her parents being ironic? Germane = ‘at once relevant and appropriate’.
No her parents were exceptional. The produced and nurtured a daughter who thinks for herself.
As time passes and women age many continue the exploration of their sexuality and most I encounter are rejecting the restricting bs of their youth and married lives.
Given your derogatory comment about Greer and her parents I doubt very much you could possibly understand that Greer in the Female Eunuch didn’t go far enough.
Many of us are beginning to understand that.
Besides burning bras and abandoning the restrictions of mysognist culture and dominance she should have urged women to abandon the restrictions placed on, and held by generations of women, their sexuality by mysognist tradition and ‘morality’.
Try harder Jody.
I know all about Greer. Even how to spell her name correctly.
What’s that sound?
Oh, just the wind in the willows.
Or is it the Serpent in the Tree of Carnal Knowledge chuckling?
You know things are bad when you start asking and answering your own questions. (Cue “Jaws” music.)
Yep stuck in the vacant territory of what you’ve been taught.
Alice I suspect the serpent is one of those religious creations used to scare the c..p out of dumb uneducated brutes of centuries ago.
Tell me why is carnal knowledge, as you asperse, a bad thing?
Carnal knowledge has improved my life and rxperience and the lives of others.
How about yours? Was you life ever lessened by carnal knowledge?