***TWO BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS***

***I am interrupting the final couple of essays in my series on marriage to share with you some very BIG news on things that my team and I have been working on at Clemson University. I am delighted to make the following two announcements.

First, the Clemson University Board of Trustees approved this past April the creation of a new academic department at Clemson that shall be known simply and solely as The Lyceum (see mission statement below).

Second, the CU Board of Trustees also approved two weeks ago the creation of new academic center at Clemson that is named the Clemson Center for the Study of the American Founding. (I will have something to say about the new “founding” center in a couple of weeks).

Both the new department and the “founding” center will be under the purview of the Snow Institute for the Study of Capitalism.

The ossified system of higher education as we have known it in the decades since the end of the Second World War is imploding. Creative destruction is coming to higher education and from the ashes . . . may I present . . .

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THE LYCEUM:

MISSION STATEMENT

Sapere Aude—“Dare to know”

The Lyceum at Clemson University—inspired by Aristotle’s fourth-century school in Athens—is a new kind of academic department that seeks to revive the original vision and purpose of higher education: to inspire young men and women to pursue intellectual and moral excellence through a rigorous engagement with the great philosophic, historical, literary, and economic texts of Western civilization. To that end, The Lyceum is an academic community devoted to reason, objectivity, truth-seeking, the ascent to wisdom, character formation, and the perpetuation of a free and virtuous society.

Faculty and students in The Lyceum shall be guided by six pedagogic directives. First, the pursuit of Truth is our highest responsibility. Second, the discovery of fundamental truths about the most important human questions is both possible and necessary. Third, reason and objectivity are the means of discovering fundamental truths about the human condition. Fourth, knowledge and wisdom are cumulative and can be transmitted from one generation to another. Fifth, living in accord with true moral and political principles is a requirement of human flourishing. Sixth, truth, wisdom, knowledge, and moral virtue are necessary preconditions for citizenship in a free society.

The Lyceum seeks to foster a new kind of education that is not simply contemplative but that reconciles theory and practice in the daily lives of our faculty and students. At The Lyceum, we accept Francis Bacon’s aphorism, “Knowledge is power,” and we assist our students in applying that knowledge to their private and public lives. Knowledge can, of course, be used for good or evil, but at The Lyceum our students are instructed in those moral and political truths that point them toward good and honorable lives. Ultimately, our goal is to teach our students how to think in principles and how to act on principle, so that they can fulfill their greatest potential and achieve their highest aspirations.

The Lyceum Approach

The Lyceum uses a Great Books approach to studying the history of liberty, capitalism, the American founding, and the principles of moral character. Faculty and students join a 2,500-year-old conversation (and sometimes a battle of ideas) that has defined Western civilization by reading, debating, and wrestling with the deepest and most influential thinkers of the Western tradition as well as the statesmen of the American political tradition.

Faculty and students should think of The Lyceum as a place where they can explore the greatest intellectual, scientific, political, economic, and artistic accomplishments of Western civilization and beyond. In The Lyceum, faculty and students shall examine together the relationship between ideas and actions; the requirements of character formation; the history of human accomplishment; the political and cultural architecture of free societies; and the economic principles and institutions that foster wealth creation and human flourishing.

The Lyceum also understands that there is an intimate relationship between education and citizenship. All forms of education result in the formation of a certain kind of human being and citizen. The Lyceum educates its students to be self-owning, self-governing, and self-reliant citizens of a free and virtuous society—citizens who have the motivation and ability to defend the principles and institutions of their society. This kind of principled patriotism represents a return to, and the completion of, the founders’ understanding of the relationship between education and citizenship.

Whereas the modern academy has fragmented knowledge into narrow disciplinary silos, The Lyceum is intellectually capacious in its approach to teaching and learning. It integrates philosophy, politics, literature, economics, history, and ethics through the canon of Great Books and the enduring questions that have shaped Western civilization and the American experiment in self-government. More particularly, The Lyceum approach is driven first and foremost by the great questions that have animated all civilizations, such as:

• What is truth?

• What is wisdom?

• What is knowledge?

• What is justice?

• What is virtue?

• What is honor?

• What is freedom?

• What is tyranny?

• What is friendship?

• What is love?

• What is grief?

• What is happiness?

• What is death?

The Lyceum approach does not, however, mean the endless—and ultimately nihilistic—pursuit of questioning for its own sake. The true philosophic way of life recognizes that reality is knowable; that the human mind is capable of discovering the truth about the most important questions; that it is both possible and necessary to live according to true moral principles; that a life of accomplishment and honor is open to all men and women; that the pursuit of happiness and a fully human life are possible only in a free society; and that the free society must be defended from its enemies.

The Lyceum is therefore reconceptualizing what it means to think, teach, and learn. Our department shall be a community of scholars in which faculty and students work together to create a close-knit “small college” experience inside a larger university. Professors and students in The Lyceum will set off together on an intellectual journey in pursuit of truth and knowledge through the close reading of core texts, Socratic-style discussion, and careful writing.

The department insists on the close, careful, and repeated reading of classic texts along with frequent and rigorous writing assignments. We also seek to foster certain habits of mind—curiosity and logical thinking, intellectual humility and courage, and clarity and precision—that equip students to think wisely, deeply, and independently in an age of ideological and emotive conformity. In so doing, we hope to liberate and elevate the minds of our students and to deepen the meaning of their lives.

The Importance of Teaching Above “Scholarship”

The Lyceum is also reconceptualizing what it means to be a professor and teacher in higher education. We seek to recover the forgotten art of classical teaching, which places teaching and mentorship above “scholarship.” In fact, The Lyceum regards much of what is today considered academic “scholarship” to be a form of trivial pursuit with little or no value for students, taxpayers, or the general public.

The Lyceum is committed to the restoration of teaching as a high intellectual and moral responsibility—one centered on the formation of free minds rather than the mere transfer, absorption, and recitation of information. Faculty in The Lyceum are chosen not merely for specialized academic expertise and research but for their capacity to engage their students in the world of ideas and to serve as models of moral and civic virtue.

In reclaiming the lost art of Socratic instruction, The Lyceum embraces and elevates undergraduate teaching and mentoring above research and publication. Teaching, rightly understood, is the noble vocation of awakening young minds to the permanent questions of human life, equipping them with the intellectual virtues necessary for living as citizens of a free society, and inspiring them to pursue truth and excellence wherever it leads.

By restoring teaching to its rightful place at the center of its mission, The Lyceum aspires to produce teachers and students who shall set off on life’s journey in the pursuit of truth, wisdom, virtue, and excellence in all they do.

While teaching and tutoring come first at The Lyceum, we do encourage our faculty to read, think, research, write, and publish, but we have a much more capacious understanding of what is known as academic “scholarship.” To whatever extent faculty in The Lyceum shall engage in research, writing, and publishing, we will support their efforts in the hope that they will write on topics that engage with and deepen our understanding of the great questions and debates animating Western civilization. Our greatest hope is that our faculty will have the capacity to impact and improve the lives of their students and fellow citizens. Otherwise, what is the point?

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The Socratic Tutoring Program

At the heart of The Lyceum is our innovative and transformative “Socratic Tutor” program. Each semester, Lyceum Scholars will be assigned a “Socratic Tutor” (a faculty member of The Lyceum), who will meet individually with each of his or her tutees every other week for approximately one hour.

The purpose of the Socratic Tutor program is twofold: first, to help our students translate the true theories and principles of the philosophic texts they are reading into their lives here and now; and second, to help our young men and women think seriously and deeply—possibly for the first time in their lives—about the question of moral character, and about their own moral characters in particular.

Following in the tradition of America’s Founding Fathers, The Lyceum takes seriously the notion that there is an intimate connection between moral virtue and a free society. As John Adams once said, “Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” A core tenet of The Lyceum and the Socratic Tutor program holds that the philosophic or contemplative way of life is incomplete without the ability and willingness to live out moral truth in practice and to translate ideas into action.

It is also imperative that Socratic Tutors serve as models of moral virtue for their students. Socratic Tutors in The Lyceum must bear witness to their vocation and to the lessons they teach. It is not enough for young people to read books about virtue and the good life. They must see these principles lived out in practice by the men and women who instruct them.

Our Socratic Tutor program is utterly unique in higher education. No other college or university anywhere in the world has anything like it.

The Model Lyceum Student

In today’s morally uncertain and sometimes chaotic world, many young people and their parents think that the purpose of higher education is job training. At The Lyceum, we view the purpose and function of education differently.

At The Lyceum, we read old books with young people, and we talk about how to apply true moral principles to our private and public lives. That is our job. The kind of education offered at The Lyceum does not train young men and women to become “professionals,” but a Lyceum education is a necessary precondition for success in life and profession.

Our practical aim is not to produce astronauts, business executives, computer programmers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, plumbers, politicians, or scientists. Instead, The Lyceum trains young men and women to seek understanding and excellence in whatever they do; to fulfill their highest ambitions in and outside their careers; and to fill their lives with meaning and purpose by knowing how this world came to be the way it is, and by knowing how to navigate the future based on expansive knowledge of the past. For in knowing the past, we can know the present, which is our gateway to the future. In short, The Lyceum educates young men and women to be successful, honorable, and happy in any chosen field or endeavor.

This is how liberal education was once seen by some of its greatest proponents. The eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up rather nicely the purpose of a Lyceum education: “Let my student be destined for the sword, the church, the bar. I do not care. Prior to the calling of his parents is nature’s call to human life. Living is the job I want to teach him. On leaving my hands, he will, I admit, be neither magistrate nor soldier nor priest. He will, in the first place, be a man.” A century later, John Stuart Mill, in his 1867 “Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews,” described a liberal education as making “a man a more intelligent shoemaker, if that be his occupation, but not by teaching him how to make shoes; it does so by the mental exercise it gives, and the habits it impresses.”

The Lyceum seeks to revolutionize higher education by restoring its original purposes and functions in the context of the twenty-first century. We shall revolutionize higher education by rediscovering and conserving the great monuments of the human mind, which have been lost or forgotten in our postmodern world. The highest aim of The Lyceum is to introduce our students to the pursuit of knowledge about human greatness and achievement. We seek to inspire all our students to the best within them.

Conclusion

From Plato and Epictetus to Rousseau and Mill, Western civilization’s deepest thinkers have understood the transformative role that a broad and deep education can play in the life of an individual and that of a nation. Liberal education is the name of the tradition that captures and promulgates this principle in The Lyceum. At The Lyceum, we seek to preserve the best that has been thought, said, and done in Western civilization. If the latter is to survive, the former must prosper.

The Lyceum seeks to restore the possibility that young minds can still be intrigued, charmed, seduced, and improved by a good book, a great conversation, a provocative question, or a vigorous debate in an environment of civility. Knowing this, we at The Lyceum know that the fate of Western civilization rests on the fate of liberal education and its quest for truth, freedom, and greatness.

***IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT EITHER THE NEW DEPARTMENT OR CENTER, PLEASE CONTACT ME DIRECT AT: tthomp2@clemson.edu

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DUMB & DUMBER 139

K-12 EDITION

THE #JUST_WALK_AWAY MOVEMENT GROWS: The ongoing exodus from traditional government schools

ARE YOU OK WITH THIS? Education Department Probes District Accused of Transing Teen Taken From Catholic Parents.

DO AMERICA’S SO-CALLED “ED” SCHOOLS BEAR SOME RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS 30-YEAR EPIDEMIC OF FEMALE TEACHERS SEXUALLY ABUSING CHILDREN? Teacher accused of ‘Scream’ mask orgies with students finally gets divorced.

CORRUPTION ALERT! Stunner: Massive potential fraud in one city’s schools

CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME WHY IT IS THAT AMERICA’S SO-CALLED “ED” SCHOOLS ARE DOING NOTHING TO FIX THIS OBVIOUS, DECADES-OLD PROBLEM? Teacher who acted like she was in ‘Sabrina Carpenter video’ is convicted of decades-old sex assaults on students.

HIGHER ED EDITION

WELCOME TO COLLEGE: First-year classes this fall range from Wonder Woman to ‘queer’ art to the occult.“

WELCOME WEEK SURE ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE: UW-Madison hosts drag show for welcome week festivities.

PLATO WAS RIGHT: HOW WE TEACH OUR CHILDREN ABOUT THE PAST MATTERS: What happens when education prepares students for everything except understanding the civilization they inherited.

FOR EVERY ACTION, THERE IS AN EQUAL AND CONTRARY REACTION: North Carolina universities have preferred female applicants for over two decades: report.

THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: U. Maryland lab begs students to sign up for class on ‘Indigenous Feminism’ and ‘monsters.’

BIG TIME. It’s ten times worse than you think: The public substantially underestimates the ideological imbalance of the professoriate. When people learn how lopsided it really is, confidence declines. Reality turns out to be lousy PR.

THE COMNG COLLAPSE? $400K for AI Cheaters Luxury Camp: How many colleges will survive?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Texas pushes three-year bachelor’s degrees to cut college costs.

TRUE, BUT THEY ALSO HAVE TOO MANY ADMINISTRATORS: Most universities have ‘too many academic programs,’ chief business officers say.

WHERE THERE’S ONE . . . YOU WILL FIND MANY UNDER THE CARPET : U. Missouri suspends staffer who told undercover reporter DEI continues.

A BETTER RULE WOULD BE: YOU CAN GO TO ANY COLLEGE YOU WANT BELOW THE MASON-DIXON LINE (EXCLUDING DUKE, VANDERBILT, AND ANYTHING IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA): My kids can go to any college they want — but I won’t pay for Harvard or Columbia.

SIGH! University of Minnesota faces third federal investigation into ‘therapeutic’ dolls with ‘interchangeable genitalia’

PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION EDITION

THE LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS: Watchdog exposes hidden academic pipeline behind left-wing election litigation

FEMINISM IS DEAD: Chicago community college will train midwives to help ‘birthing individuals.’

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*I have one small request of readers at The Redneck Intellectual. I would be most appreciative if you would please share this essay with as many people as you can. Thanks.

**Audio recording is below.

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Over the course of the previous six essays in this series on the nature and meaning of marriage in a free society (see here, here, here, here, here, and here), we have examined various aspects of what marriage is and is not and why marriage properly defined and understood is crucial to a healthy and civil society. In our concluding series of essays on marriage, we shift gears and consider two final questions: first, what is the proper role of government in marriage, and second, will laws supporting what we have called postmodern “marriage” expand or contract the sphere of freedom in America?

To help us answer these two questions, we shall reconsider the all-too-common question posed by the Boston Globe that we examined in our previous essay on “Marriage Nihilism.” The Globe asked: “How would gay civil marriage affect your lives, liberties, or opportunities, or your own marriages?” This is an important question that must be answered.

In our two previous essays on “The Meaning of Marriage Equality” and “Marriage Nihilism,” we considered how same-sex marriage would affect the institution of marriage morally and socially. In the next few essays, we shall consider how metaphysical and postmodern marriage would affect our lives, our liberties, and our opportunities politically and legally. Specifically, we want to know whether government in a free society should have the power to coerce people into accepting postmodern marriage via laws, indoctrination, and censorship. Let us recall that one of the principal arguments for postmodern marriage is that Americans should be free to live however they choose and to love whomever they choose. In other words, does postmodern marriage expand or diminish freedom?

In today’s essay, I examine the role of government in metaphysical or true marriage (i.e., the union of one man and one woman that is monogamous, sexually exclusive, and permanent).

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Metaphysical Marriage and Government

On the metaphysical view, government has a legitimate but limited role to play in marriage. Let’s begin by stating clearly what the government of a free society must not do relative to marriage.

Generally speaking, government should not be in the business of defining and enforcing the content of private, non-contractual human relationships. It should not determine, for instance, what it means to be a friend, a brother or sister, a lover, or a son or daughter. These relationships can be just as intense and important to the individuals involved in them as those of a married man and woman, and yet we do not and would not want the government regulating such relationships. The manners and mores associated with such relationships are best regulated through informal cultural norms and individual choices. The same is true of romantic, non-marital sexual relationships. In a free society, the State has no business in either endorsing or forbidding certain kinds of voluntary relationships between consenting adults. Nor should government be involved in propping up the self-esteem and dignity of certain individuals or groups.

Likewise, government should never attempt to create a social institution like marriage simply by ordering it into being and forcing individuals to accept it. This much is therefore certain: first, marriage is not and should not be created by government; and second, government should not function as a social engineer regulating the content of private, voluntary associations. Instead, its proper role should be limited to serving as a rights-protecting, rights-enforcing agency that ensures all adult relationships are voluntary and that the rights of children are protected.

The government of a free society may, however, recognize and facilitate certain kinds of relationships by providing them with a legal framework through which their forms and formalities are defined objectively and protected either by law or through written contracts. In order to fulfill this role, however, the government must know what marriage is. There is no time or place in world history where governments did not draw a line and say “this is marriage” to the exclusion of all other relationships. Governments do the same, for instance, regarding driver’s licenses and restrictions on who can vote. Even today, some proponents of same-sex marriage want to draw a line in the sand and exclude (which means to discriminate against) polygamous and polyamorous relationships from the status of marriage.

For marriage to be recognized in law, it must be understood and identified as some particular thing as opposed to something else or to nothing at all, and it must have a definition that distinguishes it from all other relationships. This is the only way that contracts or laws could be made to identify, distinguish, and protect marriage from all other relationships. The alternative to defining marriage as something particular (i.e., as having objectively grounded characteristics rather than whims and desires) is to say that it is nothing in particular and thereby obliterate its meaning altogether.

Regarding metaphysical marriage (i.e., true marriage), government has a strictly delimited role as a rights-respecting, rights-protecting agency. In other words, the proper role of government in marriage should be largely laissez-faire. From the perspective of the men and women who seek conjugal union, the rights-protecting role of government in marriage is twofold: first, to recognize and then protect the rights of married couples as a marital unit from outside interference, i.e., the right to their marital union, and, second, to serve as a neutral arbiter in settling legal disputes between husbands and wives as separate individuals.

In the first instance, government recognizes marriage through registration and licensing. In doing so, it protects the status and interests of married couples as a single, integrated unit against third parties who may seek to interfere in their marital union (e.g., legal cases involving next of kin); it assists in transferring property from one generation to another; and it supports their right to raise any children born of their conjugal union free of outside interference.

In the second instance, government recognizes marriage by providing a default legal framework for adjudicating disputes between husbands and wives. Marriage is—in part—a contract between a man and a woman, which means that its general rights and responsibilities should be known and spelled out in advance, such that the role of the government is limited to ensuring that the union is consensual and that its terms are known to both parties and enforced if necessary. Men and women who seek a permanent and exclusive union look to the government to serve as a neutral third party in adjudicating disputes that may arise between husbands and wives (e.g., joint property issues, spousal abuse, divorce, alimony, child custody and support, etc.).

But there is another important perspective from which to view the role of government in marriage, i.e., from the perspective of any children born to a married couple. The rights of children must be protected as well. Children come into the world defenseless and dependent on their parents, and the parents have a moral and a legal responsibility to protect their children’s right to life, and they also have a moral and legal right to be the adults who do so. Sadly, not all parents fulfill their responsibility. As part of its legitimate oversight role in marriage, government is therefore properly concerned with protecting the rights of children from abuse, neglect, or abandonment.

Public recognition of marriage permits governments to identify the parents of children. Without it, governments would face a difficult, if not a nearly impossible, task of determining the paternity of abandoned or abused children. Marriage solves that problem. The first line of defense in protecting the rights of children is for government to know who their biological parents are. Government-recognized marriage therefore acknowledges the procreative potential of heterosexual relationships, and it provides a legal structure that protects the bearing and rearing of children by their natural parents. The presumption of marriage is that husbands and wives will only have children within the context of their conjugal relationship, and they will raise them together as a family.

Thus, a proper government may issue marriage licenses with the ultimate goal of protecting children from abandonment, neglect, and abuse. Marriage joins husbands and wives together to become lifelong mothers and fathers. Were it not for children, there would be no need for the government to be in the marriage business other than to adjudicate what could otherwise be private contracts. If marriage were simply about defining the relational rights and responsibilities of two adults, pooling their resources, and sharing experiences and love, then again there would be no reason to have marriage recognized with its own distinct legal structure as opposed to a private contract.

In a free society, government should not regulate private relationships other than to adjudicate contracts between private parties. Moreover, a proper government should not be in the business of recognizing or sanctioning love, feelings, affection, self-esteem, or friendship. Proponents of a free society should not want the government issuing “friendship licenses” or “romance licenses,” for instance. While governments should have no interest in friendships, romantic unions (including even the most intense and intimate relationships heterosexual or homosexual), and the consensual sexual relationships of adults, they do have a vested interest in marriages. In fact, marriage is the only private personal relationship for which a government has a legitimate interest in providing some minimal degree of public recognition beyond mere contractual adjudication. Government has a vested interest in the perpetuation of the society over which it governs, and so it has a special interest in providing a salutary legal structure for the social relationship most responsible for reproducing and educating the individuals who make up the society. In other words, it has a special interest in the health and well-being of marriages by protecting the rights of married couples.

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Marriage is different—radically different—from all other kinds of relationships. It is different from friendships and non-marital romantic relationships (heterosexual and homosexual). These different kinds of relationships can be just as intense, close, and loving as those of married couples. And yet, we do not permit or want the State to regulate friendships or romantic relationships (heterosexual and homosexual) above and beyond any contractual arrangements concerning the disposition of property, next of kin, and power of attorney. Government recognizes different kinds of contractual relationships, but it does not call them marriage. They go by different names because they are different kinds of association serving different ends.

Marriage, unlike other personal relationships, serves an objective public good: responsible procreation so that children are not hurt and society is perpetuated. This is one of the few instances in which we can say that a government policy is in the “public interest.” Only the most radical nihilists would oppose the protection of children and the preservation of civil society if not the species. (And yet, such people do exist, and they pose an existential threat to a free society.)

On the metaphysical view, government therefore has what we might call a minimal, “Night Watchman” role in overseeing the conditions necessary for the creation of families and the rearing of children. A properly limited, rights-respecting government has an interest in providing the basic legal scaffolding supporting the natural family, particularly regarding the entry and exit points (i.e., marriage, divorce, and death).

One of the important virtues of marriage as a social institution is that it facilitates a great deal of voluntary cooperation with a minimal legal structure and interference by the government. It sanctions and protects millions of mini societies (or “little platoons,” as Burke called them) made up of married mothers and fathers and their biological children. These small social units serve to educate children to become self-governing adults, and they are how a community of individuals perpetuates itself. If a husband and wife fulfill their basic responsibilities as parents, the government should have no interest in their marriage. In this way, marriage is the ultimate instantiation of the Hayekian system of spontaneous order: it is a bottom-up, self-regulating, self-replicating, voluntary system of long-term cooperative action that requires no guidance from the State. It only asks of the government that the metaphysically grounded rights associated with marriage be protected.

Not all romantic relationships in a free society, however, will result in marriage. Non-marital romantic relationships can be heterosexual, homosexual, polygamous, and polyamorous, and sometimes those relationships will seek to imitate or replicate some or all of the characteristics and protections of marriage (e.g., a legally recognized union that is monogamous, sexually exclusive, and permanent).

How might the government of a free society deal with these kinds of relationships?

Let’s consider the case of same-sex relationships. In a free society, recognizing and protecting the rights of individuals is the only proper foundation of justice, which includes protecting the right to freedom of association and the corollary right to form contracts. Regarding romantic and sexual unions, that which is done between consenting adults in the privacy and sanctity of one’s home should be no business of the government. Every individual adult living in the United States should feel free and safe to experience and fulfill their various romantic and sexual needs unregulated by government and without fear of punishment. This we should do with all due and deliberate speed.

In a free society, there are many different kinds of relationships that are or can be defined by contracts and deserving of a separate and distinct legal status, including long-term, even permanent romantic relationships of various descriptions, e.g., common-law “marriages,” same-sex relationships, polyamorous, and polygamous relationships. Romantic homosexual unions are real, and they can be just as intense as heterosexual relationships, just as meaningful to the individuals who experience them and just as long-lasting as marriages, but they are a different kind of relationship and so they deserve a different kind of legal status.

The proponents of a free society should support liberalizing and/or expanding the law to include the recognition of such relationships. We should work quickly to ensure that homosexuals do in fact have the same rights to make contracts that heterosexuals do. Homosexual partners in a permanent romantic union should have the freedom to form private contracts that would recognize their right to establish a legal, next-of-kin relationship different from their birth status. (This right should also be extended to unmarried heterosexual couples as well.) Furthermore, they should be granted legal provisions guaranteeing their rights relative to inheritance and tax law and to issues concerning, for instance, hospital-visitation rights. Homosexuals, like heterosexuals, should not be the object of State force that violates their right of free association, nor should they be denied the ability to form private contracts.

Expanding the regime of justice does not, however, require a state-mandated change in the definition of marriage. Other than enforcing private contracts, the State should have no legitimate interest in the private life of a long-term homosexual union. To all intents and purposes, properly designed civil unions afford homosexuals equal treatment under the law. In fact, most, if not all, of the legal goals of the postmodern marriage movement could be achieved in the absence of same-sex marriage.

In a free society, a wide range of romantic and non-romantic relationships could and should take legally recognized and legally binding vows that consummate mutual pledges of loyalty and support. This would allow polygamous and polyamorous relationships, for instance, to form as “civil partnerships” dedicated to securing various legal and personal protections for their relationships. In fact, such protections could be extended to a wide variety of non-marital relationships, including those of heterosexual siblings or friends who might wish to provide or care for each other throughout life and who might want to establish one or the other as legal “next of kin.”

An objective approach takes the moral condemnation of homosexuality, polygamy, polyamory, and other forms of romantic association out of the legal-political sphere. In a truly free society, individuals will remain free to engage in these relationships while other individuals will be equally free to judge and condemn those relationships if they find them abhorrent. What cannot be permitted in a free society is using the coercive force of the State to either criminalize such relationships or to criminalize the thought, speech, and actions of those who do not sanction them. In other words, Christian traditionalists may not use the coercive force of the State to outlaw homosexual acts just as secular Leftists may not use the coercive force of the State to outlaw Christian traditionalists from expressing and acting on their principles.

The approach I’m suggesting has the virtue of requiring only small changes to the law and to society, and it would require no expansion of the State, nor the violation of anyone’s rights. In fact, it is the one and only solution that expands the rights of individuals. It is a Hayekian solution to a Hayekian problem. It is the solution that would give everyone what they want (if what they want is really what they say they want), but it would not disrupt or upend society and cause social civil war. More importantly, it is the solution most in accord with the principles and institutions of a free society. The objective case against postmodern marriage is strengthened if we expand the category of civil union to include those appropriate legal rights from which same-sex couples and polygamous and polyamorous relationships may have been unjustly excluded in the past.

Here’s the audio recording of “Marriage and the Role of Government in a Free Society.” Because of the importance of the topic, I’m making it free for unpaid subscribers in the hope that you will share the essay and recording far and wide.

The Redneck Intellectual is providing content that you won’t find anywhere else on the internet, or with Super Intelligence, or in America’s college classrooms, or from the so-called “intellectual” class. In light of that fact, I wonder if you wouldn’t consider a paid subscription to help with date night at Chick-fil-A with Mrs. Redneck!?!?

I’m putting some of today’s content—i.e., “The Ugly” and “The Beautiful”—behind the paywall in the the hopes that it might inspire some of you to finally pull the trigger and sign up for a paid subscription to The Redneck Intellectual. Your support of Chick-fil-A Date Night with Mrs. Redneck would be greatly appreciated. Just as importantly, it’s also a sign to me that you value my work. It actually means a lot, and it fuels my motivation.

THE GOOD

SOMEBODY HAD TO SAY IT: The West Is a Superior Civilization (And I Don’t Care If That Offends You).

MORE AND BETTER ENERGY IS BOTH NECESSARY AND GOOD FOR CIVILIZATION: The real foundation and future of human progress

I’ll TAKE A HARD WORKING IMMIGRANT OVER THESE PEOPLE ANY DAY OF THE WEEK: The luxury of self-destruction.

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND UP

• Nearly 80 Headless Human Skeletons Discovered At A Spooky Stone Age Site.

• Archaeologists Unearth Stonehenge ‘Prototype’ Near Monument

• Hunter-gatherers in Siberia died of a plague outbreak 5,500 years ago: We can’t blame the Neolithic Transition for the plague anymore.

• Stonehenge breakthrough reveals surprising path behind ancient stone’s 450-mile trek

• 5,300-year-old mummy reveals eerie ‘signs of life’ in discovery that stuns researchers

FROM THE ALWAYS GREAT ROGER KIMBALL: The Madness of the Anti-AI Crowd.

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND UP

• People with more muscle mass and less visceral fat have younger brains, study finds.

• Scientists Reveal Turning Point When Your Body’s Aging Accelerates.

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* This is now the sixth essay in my series on the nature and meaning of marriage. I know a lot of you have many questions. Be patient! After this essay, I will finish this series with two or three essays on how marriage and all other romantic unions should be recognized by the law in a free society. I think these future essays will address many of the questions that some of you have been wondering about.

**The audio recording of this essay is at the bottom and available to all subscribers.

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It is often said of postmodern “marriage” that it does not affect the marriages of heterosexual couples. As The Boston Globe asked in an oft-cited editorial defending same-sex marriage, “How would gay civil marriage affect your lives, liberties, or opportunities, or your own marriages?” This is the million-dollar question that has left conservatives and Christians stammering for an answer. This simple and seemingly commonsense question is no doubt important, but it is also a disingenuous and trivial evasion of the nature and point of marriage.

On a superficial level, a same-sex “marriage” would not affect my marriage for the same reasons that none of the various forms of postmodern marriage (e.g., polygamous, polyamorous, bigamous, incestuous, pedophilic, or interspecies) would affect my marriage. If two men want to marry, if a man and five women want to marry, if ten men and women want to marry each other, or if a woman wants to marry a dolphin, none of these unions will have any effect on my marriage in the same way that no other heterosexual marriage affects mine. Why not? On one level, all these relationships are private matters that do not have any bearing on my marriage, which is also a private matter. The simple truth of the matter is that there are only two people in the entire world who could affect my marriage: I am one and the other is my wife.

On a deeper and more fundamental level, same-sex marriage will unquestionably affect my liberties and opportunities in innumerable ways; it will affect my marriage indirectly and in meaningful ways; and it will certainly affect the way future generations experience marriage. The postmodern view of “marriage” will impose a variety of “negative externalities” on society and therefore actually harm the institution of marriage—and my marriage with it.

By democratizing and disconnecting marriage from its metaphysical roots, the postmodern view of marriage will inject a major dose of subjectivism, egalitarianism, and moral relativism into America’s marriage culture. It is grounded in the subjectivist premise that marriage is simply about individual wants, feelings, and needs, on the egalitarian premise that marriage is about companionship and all companionships are equal, and on the relativist principle that we cannot rank, distinguish, or judge one form of romantic union from another. The postmodern view makes different things the same and it makes unequal things equal.

The subjectivism, egalitarianism, and relativism built into the postmodern view of marriage will cause Americans to adopt what Abraham Lincoln called a “Don’t Care” policy toward marriage and parenting. (Lincoln was referring to Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty” as it applied to the slavery issue.) This “Don’t Care” policy is the single greatest threat to marriage. It will lead to a society (i.e., the world of our relatives, friends, neighbors) that can’t muster the moral norms and supports necessary to sustain an inherently fragile institution over the longue durée.

Under the best circumstances, marriage is hard work, especially if it involves the rearing of children. The dedication that is required to make it work, day in and day out, over the course of forty or fifty years is not automatic. Marriage is also an inherently fragile institution that must be respected and supported with various moral and cultural norms if it is to prosper and last. The long and sometimes bumpy journey that is marriage is rendered more difficult if society and its accompanying moral norms do not recognize and uphold it as unique, important, and exalted in some important way. The “Don’t Care” philosophy applied to marriage cannot sustain an inherently delicate institution.

The subjectivism, egalitarianism, and relativism of postmodern marriage represent not just an expansion and dilution of marriage, but also a fundamental redefinition of its constituent parts, characteristics, and purposes. The parts of marriage—true marriage—consist of one man and one woman, who become a husband and a wife and potentially a mother and a father. The postmodern view, by contrast, redefines or eliminates the constituent parts of marriage and family. Not only can a man have a husband (or a wife who is a biological man) and a woman a wife (or a husband who is a biological woman), but they can have as many of each or as many of both as they wish. In other words, the number of constituent parts that define marriage can no longer be limited to the number two. It can be two, three, five, or ten. The number is now open-ended. Ultimately, the conceptual confusion encouraged by the postmodern view of marriage will lead to abolishing the concepts “husband” and “wife” altogether and replacing them with concepts such as “partner” or “spouse 1,” “2,” “3,” or “10.”

Postmodern marriage also includes a redefinition of its purpose, which is now defined under the new dispensation as companionship and sexual preference. According to E. J. Graff, a same-sex marriage advocate, the purpose of a same-sex union is fundamentally different from the purpose of a metaphysical marriage:

Marriage is an institution that towers on our social horizon, defining how we think about one another, formalizing contact with our families, neighborhoods, employers, insurers, hospitals, government. Allowing two people of the same sex to marry shifts that institution’s message. . . . If same-sex marriage becomes legal, that venerable institution will ever after stand for sexual choice, for cutting the link between sex and diapers.

And what is the purpose of sexual choice? Obviously, it’s about sexual gratification. By this definition, then, marriage is about who one joins with for sexual gratification, the legal protection and regulation of which is the purpose of postmodern marriage. And of course, Graff’s conditional “if” is no longer conditional. Graff’s definition of marriage is now the law of the land. And, as Graff suggests, the legalization of postmodern marriage will have serious consequences for “our families, neighborhoods, employers, insurers, hospitals, [and] government.” This s because marriage is not simply a private institution concerned with what takes place in the bedroom. The ripple effects of a redefined marriage will reverberate throughout society. These effects will be mostly unseen until they’re not.

By contrast, metaphysical marriage is about much more than sexual choice and companionship. It is about creating, protecting, and loving a sum greater than the original two parts, namely, a family. My marriage treats my wife and me legally as one, and by extension my marriage treats my family morally as a complex compound. But if the law were to say that two women are a marriage equal to mine, then the nature and purpose of my marriage changes. The law would now say that the difference between my marriage and theirs or that the difference between my marriage and my friendships is one of degree and not one of kind. But my marriage is different from my friendships and from same-sex unions. In fact, it is different from my eight-year love affair with the woman who would one day become my wife because the purposes were and are different. The general purpose of postmodern marriage is no longer about providing a moral and legal context for the bearing and rearing of children, which means that it will have a “Don’t Care” attitude toward creating families.

Redefining the purpose and parts of marriage will also lead, invariably, to changing its principal characteristics, thereby affecting how people experience marriage. Metaphysical marriage requires monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and permanence to make it work relative to its end; postmodern marriage and friendship require none of these things to achieve the end of sexual choice. Institutionalizing the postmodern view of marriage in law and culture will invariably erode those critical marital norms that don’t and can’t apply equally between heterosexual, homosexual, and other kinds of marital unions.

Consider one important example. As we’ve seen already, marriage arose historically to solve, among other things, a very real two-part problem: on the one hand, the need and preference of women for one romantic partner so as to ensure the security and protection of the women and their children, and, on the other hand, the need and preference of men to eliminate the psychological burden of sexual competition from other men and for paternity certainty. Evolutionary psychologists report that sexual fidelity and monogamy ensure that women can also maintain family resources by not having to share those resources with another family and that men won’t invest time and resources in other men’s offspring. Monogamy and sexual exclusivity are, therefore, key pillars of marriage. In heterosexual marriages, the cultural norms and legal rules that connect sex, monogamy, and marriage are mutually reinforcing. Monogamy and exclusivity are the triggers that make the permanence of marriage possible. They are the necessary and non-negotiable conditions for a flourishing marriage culture.

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Such norms and rules, however, do not necessarily make sense or work in same-sex or polyamorous relationships. Polygamous and polyamorous marriages are obviously, by definition, non-monogamous. And sexual exclusivity is optional in the culture of postmodern marriage. According to Andrew Sullivan, “openness”—i.e., sexual infidelity—is one of the important virtues of same-sex unions from which heterosexual couples can learn:

Same-sex unions often incorporate the virtues of friendship more effectively than traditional marriages; and at times, among gay male relationships, the openness of the contract makes it more likely to survive than many heterosexual bonds. . . . [T]here is more likely to be greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman. . . . [S]omething of the gay relationship’s necessary honesty, its flexibility, and its equality could undoubtedly help strengthen and inform many heterosexual bonds.

According to Sullivan, same-sex unions are superior to opposite-sex unions, at least in certain important ways. Same-sex unions include greater “openness,” “honesty,” “flexibility,” and “equality,” particularly as they relate to the question of extramarital affairs, which is apparently what makes same-sex marriage superior to opposite-sex marriages.

There is a growing body of social-scientific evidence suggesting that the permanence of same-sex unions is actually enhanced by infidelity. According to a 2010 front-page article in the New York Times:

A study to be released next month is offering a rare glimpse inside gay relationships and reveals that monogamy is not a central feature for many. Some gay men and lesbians argue that, as a result, they have stronger, longer-lasting and more honest relationships. And while that may sound counterintuitive, some experts say boundary-challenging gay relationships represent an evolution in marriage — one that might point the way for the survival of the institution.

New research at San Francisco State University reveals just how common open relationships are among gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. The Gay Couples Study has followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.

That consent is key. “With straight people, it’s called affairs or cheating,” said Colleen Hoff, the study’s principal investigator, “but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations.”

The study also found open gay couples just as happy in their relationships as pairs in sexually exclusive unions, Dr. Hoff said. A different study, published in 1985, concluded that open gay relationships actually lasted longer.

Marriage stability and satisfaction in homosexual unions appear to differ qualitatively from those of heterosexual unions. And why wouldn’t they be? They are different kinds of relationships with different kinds of people serving different needs and ends. Same-sex relationships appear to benefit from outside sexual relationships (or so its proponents claim), while opposite-sex relationships are almost always harmed by infidelities. Even in the face of HIV, long-term same-sex partnerships do not seem to value monogamy. One Dutch study of homosexuals found, for instance, that 86% of new HIV infections occurred “within steady partnerships.”

If marriage is treated as an elevated form of open companionship or friendship and if monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and permanence become optional in marriage, fewer people will subject themselves to the trials and tribulations of traditional marriage and fewer will have the incentive to stay married. More and more people will adopt “flex” and rescindable private contracts that do not require monogamy or the promise of staying together “till death do us part.” Sooner or later, the non-gendered, non-monogamous, and non-exclusive contractual view of marriage will be replaced by the sexual handshake and then by the more informal sexual “high five” or “fist bump.” Marriage will become the semi-legal version of “friends with benefits.” And if the cultural and legal norms supporting monogamy and permanence are eroded and become relics of a time past, then it follows that more marriages will end in divorce and marriage as an institution will lose its appeal resulting in fewer people getting and staying married. Young men and women are less likely to marry if they know that their roles as husbands and wives are not valued and supported by their relatives, friends, and neighbors. They are also less likely to stay married if permanence is not valued as a critical component of marriage.

If the “Don’t Care” philosophy is applied to the definition of what marriage is, then we shouldn’t be surprised that many young people will have a “Don’t Care” attitude toward either getting or staying married.

Moreover, if “marriage equality” demands that opposite- and same-sex romantic unions be put in the same legal framework (which it must) and if these two forms of marriage are built on different norms and rules, then to put them under the same norms and rules will lead inevitably to confusion and conflict. But “marriage equality” can’t permit different standards. It is difficult if not impossible for a single law to regulate two different kinds of relationships that serve different purposes, structures, functions, and mores. To quote Lincoln, “A house divided cannot stand.” It must become “all one thing or all the other.” The same will also be true when polygamous and polyamorous relationships apply for marriage licenses under the principle of “marriage equality” as they surely will. The result is that either heterosexual monogamy will be dropped as a cultural norm and legal rule or the cultural norms and legal rules will turn against homosexual infidelity. But if marriage is no longer an institution to regulate heterosexual relationships that bear children, then equality dictates that the norms and rules of traditional or metaphysical marriage be dropped so as not to be discriminatory.

The odds clearly suggest that traditional marital norms and laws supporting monogamy and permanence will be treated at first as optional and then, as with most optional norms, they will go the way of the dodo bird. Not surprisingly, America’s cultural elite has started the Big Push to normalize and democratize what we might call the Gay Male Ethic within marriage. If monogamy and sexual exclusivity are no longer considered a core norm and rule of marriage, then they will surely fade away thereby doing incalculable harm to marriage—and hence to children, who may now share their father or mother with other families. Infidelity and impermanence cannot guarantee the security and sense of permanence that children desperately crave and need. Fidelity and monogamy are characteristics of marriage that require a great deal of social reinforcement to be fully realized.

Finally, one of the most invidious effects of same-sex marriage is that it would change the way we evaluate and judge parenting. Conjugal marriage laws were created to support the ideal and the reality of marriage as the most salutary environment in which to raise happy and healthy children. Redefining marriage to include same-sex marriage or polyamorous marriage would legally abolish the ideal that children are best raised by their biological parents who bring different and important virtues (and vices) to childrearing. This new view, tragically, has now become the law of the land. In California, Judge Vaughn Walker argued in the Proposition 8 case that children derive no special benefit from having a mom and a dad:

Children do not need to be raised by a male parent and a female parent to be well-adjusted, and having both a male and a female parent does not increase the likelihood that a child will be well-adjusted.

The proponents of “marriage equality” argue that any two (or more) adults who claim to love a child must be treated as equal to that child’s biological parents. But surely biological parents will love their children more than all others, and surely children develop a fuller perspective on life by being raised by a mother and a father.

Not surprisingly, this view of parenting is supported by social science research. According to Rutgers sociologist, David Popenoe, “The burden of social science evidence supports the idea that gender-differentiated parenting is important for human development and that the contribution of fathers to childrearing is unique and irreplaceable.” Popenoe sums up his conclusion in these terms: [W]e should disavow the notion that ‘mommies can make good daddies,’ just as we should disavow the popular notion . . . that ‘daddies can make good mommies.’ . . . The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being.”

The postmodern view of marriage says, by contrast, that it doesn’t matter if a child is raised by his biological parents or by a mother and a father. As with the idea of marriage itself, the postmodern view of parenting and family says that all forms of parenting are equal and that no one family form is superior to another. Conjugal marriage is no longer the preferred structure for raising children, but just one of many different but equal forms. Katherine Bartlett, a leading proponent of the postmodern view of marriage, places a great deal of value “on family diversity and on the freedom of individuals to choose from a variety of family forms. . . .” Again, the postmodern view of family is designed to satisfy the wishes of adults rather than to protect the needs of children.

The social signal sent by promoting the idea that it matters not whether children are reared by both their mother and father will diminish the social pressure and incentive that a husband should stay with his wife and children or that a woman should have children in marriage. It is also a well-established fact in the social science literature that children raised outside of functioning marriages have higher rates of infant mortality, poverty, physical illness, drug use, promiscuous sexual activity, juvenile delinquency, teen suicide, and adult criminality. We hurt children by denying them the love, security, and knowledge that come with having a married mother and father.

And now we come to the hard truth about the “Don’t Care” view of marriage: its ultimate meaning is to elevate the welfare of adults above children. By institutionalizing “marriage equality,” we are announcing to the world that the fundamental public purpose of marriage is no longer concerned with the welfare of children. Ultimately, the postmodern view of marriage disregards the needs of children. Indeed, it represents an adult-centric, narcissistic assault on children. It puts the emotional needs of adults before those of the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society. The postmodern “Don’t Care” view of marriage relegates children to an afterthought. And if we don’t really care who raises and educates children, why should we be surprised if, at some point, the government decides it can do a better job raising and educating children.

Ultimately, when you add up the subjectivism, egalitarianism, and relativism of the “Don’t Care” view of marriage, the sum of these forces leads to one logical conclusion: that the postmodern view is self-consciously nihilist by design and intent. Its goal is not to preserve, protect, and spread the benefits of marriage by expanding its definition to include more people. No: the purpose of postmodern marriage is to destroy marriage by transforming it into something else. Its leading proponents do not support marriage because they think it is a good thing, the benefits of which they hope to extend to homosexuals. Victoria Brownworth, a leading same-sex marriage proponent, has argued that former President George W. Bush was right “when he states that allowing same-sex marriage couples to marry will weaken the institution of marriage. . . . It most certainly will do so, and that will make marriage a far better concept than it previously has been.” That’s the point; that’s the goal.

This is why the postmodernists view same-sex marriage as a moral and political Trojan Horse, the purpose of which is to forever alter and ultimately abolish metaphysical marriage. According to Professor Ellen Willis, by conferring the legitimacy of traditional marriage on homosexual unions, the postmodernists can “introduce an implicit revolt against the institution into its very heart.” Queer activist Michelangelo Signorile, revealed the strategy of the Queer Left when he encouraged his comrades to seek a temporary “middle ground” by fighting for “same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely,” with the ultimate goal of demanding “the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution.” The goal is to corrupt marriage from the inside. Queer liberationists should fight, he argues, “for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, because the most subversive action lesbians and gay men can undertake . . . is to transform the notion of ‘family’ entirely.”

It turns out that the movement for same-sex marriage is not about “marriage equality” after all. In fact, it is not really about marriage at all, or even equality for that matter. No serious person thinks that the movement for same-sex marriage is an end in itself. It is, of course, as its proponents have made clear time and again, a means to a much more ambitious end. The true end is the dissolution and ultimate extinction of civil marriage as a social institution and with it the abolition of private family life. This is why “Gay marriage is a lie,” according to LGBTTQQ+ activist Masha Gessen. “Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there,” she revealed. For Gessen and her allies, “It is a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.”

And why should Gessen and her fellow travelers want to legalize same-sex marriage as the first step to abolishing marriage? The most radical proponents of postmodern marriage want to end traditional marriage so they can abolish the family, and they want to abolish the family so they can abolish private property, and they want to abolish private property so they can abolish man’s self-interested nature, and they want to abolish self-interest so they can collectivize the human soul and thereby usher in true communism.

This mode of reasoning has a long lineage. In his Republic, Plato creates an imaginary city where the men of the “guardian” class (i.e., those who defend the city from foreign invaders and who protect the city from internal corruption) hold all women and children in common, which means there are no monogamous and sexually-exclusive marriages, no private households, and no knowledge of one’s own parent or child. The purpose of this arrangement is to create a collective soul, where all men view all things as shared and in common.

A similar arrangement and goal are proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Whereas Plato abolishes the “guardian” family, Marx and Engels seek to abolish the traditional bourgeoisie family first, after which the proletarian family will wither away. That abolishing the bourgeois family is meant ultimately to abolish private property and self-interest is seen most clearly for Marx and Engels in the following passage from the Manifesto:

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Marx and Engels set the terms. Their goal was clear: marriage must be abolished to achieve communism. The problem, of course, is that abolishing marriage through the coercive force of the State was a bridge too far even for other socialists never mind the general public and virtually impossible to achieve by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and all twentieth-century communists. Rather than simply abolishing marriage and the family outright, the New Left began their long march through the institutions in the 1960s and 1970s, which included most importantly the related institutions of marriage and the family.

The question for us is, how did radical factions such as the Queer Liberation Movement (a neo-Marxist front organization) morph into the same-sex marriage movement? According to the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto of 1971:

The oppression of gay people starts in the most basic unit of society, the family. . . . The very form of the family works against homosexuality. . . . Reform cannot change the deep-down attitude of straight people . . . because it is rooted in our society’s most basic institution—the Patriarchal Family.

Gay-liberation Marxists faced the same dilemma as Lenin and Stalin: how can the family be abolished without directly and openly using force, particularly if you’d never get elected on the “Let’s Abolish Marriage” platform. At a certain point, the Gay-Liberation Marxists adopted the colloquial philosophy, “if you can’t beat’ em, join’ em,” but we’ll beat’ em in the long run. In other words, the new strategy was to destroy the family by corrupting the institution of marriage from within.

Conclusion

In sum, the postmodern view of marriage undermines the nature, structure, and purpose of marriage, which is grounded in an objective, metaphysical reality—namely, the need to reconcile the sexual capacities and consequences of men and women. By severing marriage from the requirements of human life and by severing it from its core purpose and characteristics, we make marriage the product of nothing more than arbitrary human will and politics. And if marriage is not grounded in the facts of human nature and the realities of civil society, its inner meaning and logic will shrivel and die as some of the proponents of postmodern marriage hope for. Nay, more: if we stigmatize metaphysical marriage as the source and vehicle for bigotry and hatred, we are ultimately saying that marriage is a bigoted and hateful institution. That can’t be good for marriage, and it can’t be good for children. Institutions grounded in bigotry and hate do not typically last very long. But that, I suppose, is the point.

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DUMB & DUMBER 137

K-12 EDITION

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PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION EDITION

AMERICA’S HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS, PARTICULARLY THOSE CONCERNED WITH PROFESSIONAL TRAINING, ARE CORRUPT TO THE CORE:

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DUMB & DUMBER 138

K-12 EDITION

IT’S WHAT THEY DO: ‘Exposing young children to graphic sexual content’: ADF demands school district scrap or overhaul curriculum

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HIGHER ED EDITION

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GOOD QUESTION: Why Is the University of Michigan Hiding Grades?

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HEY, JEWISH STUDENTS: LEAVE THE FORMER SO-CALLED “IVY LEAGUE” AND C’MON DOWN TO THE NEW AND TRUE IVY LEAGUE (IF YOU HAVE THE ACADEMIC CHOPS, THAT IS): Jewish students, come here to the South — where you’ll be safe.

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I’D SAY SO!

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PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION EDITION

OF COURSE THEY DO: University of Minnesota Medical School expects faculty to incorporate DEI into research, teaching.

***HAVE A GREAT WEEK

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Ok, after a longish break, I’m back now to finish my series of essays on marriage. There will be at least three more essays to come.

The audio version of this essay is at the bottom.

Having defined and contrasted the metaphysical and postmodern views of marriage in previous essays in this series (see here and here), let us turn now and respond to the two most common and effective arguments for same-sex marriage, which are, first, that homosexuals deserve the same equal right to marry as do heterosexuals, and second, that same-sex marriage will have no effect on heterosexual marriage.

These two claims are meant to be irrefutable, conversation stoppers, but they are not. I shall demonstrate how and why both arguments are incoherent and collapse under their weightlessness. I shall take up the first argument (i.e., that homosexuals deserve the same equal right to marry as do heterosexuals) in this essay, and the second claim (i.e., that same-sex marriage will have no effect on heterosexual marriage) in the next essay in this ongoing series.

To take these two arguments seriously requires one to almost entirely evade the context defining the nature and meaning of marriage. The proponents of same-sex marriage do not want you to think about this issue on principle, nor do they want you to think about its long-term consequences. Instead, they prefer that you think about it in a narrow, superficial, emotionalist, concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment manner devoid of a larger context. They want to redefine marriage by substituting the secondary qualities and characteristics of marriage for the primary qualities and characteristics, which they consider to be irrelevant. This issue is much too serious and its consequences much too far-reaching to not examine it in the full light of day.

The question that we shall address is: should same-sex marriage be recognized as a moral and legal right?

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MARRIAGE AND EQUAL RIGHTS

Over the course of the last two decades, the proponents of the same-sex marriage movement have successfully claimed the moral high ground in their fight for “social justice,” and they have certainly won the PR battle in the name of fairness and equality. Their cause is said to be the last frontier of the civil rights movement. (It turns out this “last frontier” was just the first of many new frontiers.) The same-sex marriage movement (and all other forms of postmodern marriage) speaks in the name of a catchy and near-irresistible slogan that fits conveniently on a bumper sticker: “marriage equality.” Who in America isn’t for marriage and equality? Who wouldn’t want the law to treat all marriages equally?

This was certainly the opinion reached by a federal judge in Texas, who declared a Texas law banning same-sex marriage unconstitutional on the grounds that: “Without a rational relation to a legitimate governmental purpose, state-imposed inequality can find no refuge in our United States Constitution.” Having claimed the mantle of rationality, equality, and the Constitution, the judge’s rhetorical legerdemain would seem to end any serious conversation on the topic.

Jonathan Rauch, one of the most thoughtful and influential proponents of same-sex marriage, reinforces the judge’s point this way in his influential book, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America :

‘All men are created equal,’ says the Declaration of Independence . . . ‘They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ For homosexuals no less than heterosexuals, home and family . . . are at the heart of the pursuit of happiness . . . Marriage is an irreplaceable ingredient in the quest for home and family . . . and so, if the Declaration’s words mean anything, they suggest that to deprive millions of Americans of any hope of an emotionally satisfying relationship—marriage—is unjust. . . .

This is a rhetorically if not an emotionally powerful argument that touches on the fundamental values defining what it means to be an American. The proponents of same-sex marriage argue quite persuasively that to deny homosexuals “marriage equality” is a violation of their civil rights in the same way that requiring black Americans to sit at the back of the bus was a violation of their civil rights. Nay, more: the proponents of same-sex marriage have divined that their opponents are motivated by hatred, bigotry, and homophobia, which is akin to racism. To define and support marriage as the union of one man and one woman is now the moral equivalent of turning loose the dogs and hoses on homosexuals. To oppose same-sex marriage is therefore immoral because it means treating people unequally on the grounds of sexual orientation.

Jonathan Rauch is a serious and thoughtful man, but his claim is specious and fundamentally false. The simple truth is this: limiting marriage to one man and one woman does not violate anyone’s rights and it does not violate the principle of equality. It no more discriminates against homosexuals than does the government’s limiting of driver’s licenses to those who can see. Subjective wants and needs are not the same as reality and rights.

Equality in the tradition of the Declaration of Independence refers to the equal moral sovereignty of every individual in society. Equal moral sovereignty means equal individual rights. The principle of equality rightly understood does not mean equality of needs, demands, wants, choices, actions, relationships, lifestyles, and emotional states. Equality of rights does not mean equality of results; it does not mean giving everyone the same stuff; it does not mean giving all people access to the same government facilities; it does not mean that all relationships are equal; it does not mean sameness; and it does not mean that government must recognize all relationships as marriage.

State laws that recognize marriage as the union of one man and one woman do not use the coercive force of government to restrict or deny anyone’s freedom of action to associate or to form private contracts. In fact, if government got out of the marriage business altogether, recognizing and sanctioning no marriages, including heterosexual marriages, no one’s rights would have been violated.

If postmodern marriage were an inalienable right, on what possible grounds could the government deny bigamous, polygamous, or polyamorous marriages? On what “rational” grounds could our Texas judge deem a polyamorous marriage or the marriage between two heterosexual sisters to be deserving of unequal treatment before the law? If marriage were a right, why shouldn’t individuals have the right to marry as many people as they’d like or whomever they like? Surely such “state-imposed inequality” can find no place in the Constitution of the United States. Ironically, we will now allow two sixteen-year-old boys to marry (with parental and judicial consent) but not to vote! How can that be just?

How, then, can individual rights be violated in the context of marriage?

The rights of individuals (homosexual or heterosexual) would be violated if they were forced by the government to marry against their will, or, alternatively, if they were prevented from associating with whomever they wanted to associate with, including having sexual relations with whomever they wanted (standard exceptions apply, e.g., children and the mentally incompetent). Laws prohibiting homosexual relationships were—and are—a violation of rights and should be abolished.

The truth of the matter is this: There is no inalienable “right” to marry, not even for heterosexuals, if by a right to marry is meant the right to government recognition. (By way of analogy, there is no right to a driver’s license, which is why the government has the authority to restrict the kinds of people to whom it gives a driver’s license.) There is of course a fundamental right to free association that should extend to all adults to associate with whomever they choose. This right includes homosexuals and individuals in polygamous or polyamorous relationships, but there is no “right” for non-marital relationships to be recognized by government as marriages.

Morally decent people everywhere support marriage equality. All marriages before the law must in fact be treated equally. The philosophic error of the so-called “marriage equality” movement, however, is to put equality before or above marriage. They begin with a thoroughly egalitarian definition of equality and then apply it to marriage to get their preferred outcome. This is to define marriage by equality rather than by the facts of reality. It is putting the cart before the horse. Marriage equality must begin with marriage first (i.e., with an objective definition of marriage that is grounded in the facts of reality) and then apply the legal principle of equity or “equality before the law” to the concept of marriage. In other words, marriage reality (as established here) precedes and is the foundation of marriage equality. The facts, reality, and logic of marriage do not go the other way around. This is why defining marriage properly is the critical issue and must precede any discussion of marriage equality and the legality of marriage.

The simple truth of the matter is that there are no metaphysical facts which give rise to same-sex marriage. A proper rights-respecting government should have nothing to say about love or sex between consenting adults (heterosexual or homosexual). Government did not invent friendship and romantic love, nor should we ever want government to be in the business of defining or regulating friendship and romantic love. Such values and relationships would exist and thrive whether the government existed or not. They are entirely private matters. Marriage is, however, a different kind of relationship relative to all other relationships such as friendship or non-marital romantic love. It serves a different purpose. The difference between marriage and all other forms of romantic union is one of kind and not of degree, which means that the “privileges and immunities” and “equal protection” clauses of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment simply don’t apply to non-marital relationships.

Marriage is and has been for millennia recognized by society and government as the union of one man and one woman for a specific purpose (i.e., the propagation, rearing, and education of children) and is therefore deserving of special consideration in the law. Moreover, men and women bring radically different qualities and characteristics (physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual) to a marriage, which, when combined, creates something wholly new and different and which serves to benefit children. Marriage reconciles two foreign worlds that are otherwise fraught with mystery, tension, insecurity, and danger in ways unknown to same-sex partnerships. This mixture creates a union that cannot be replicated in male-male or female-female relationships. The sexual union of a man and a woman has the potential to create new human life, while the sexual union of same-sex couples does not, and that is a fundamental difference of kind and not of degree. Moreover, a male-male relationship is different from a female-female relationship, and both are radically different from a male-female relationship, but the core or sole attribute of marriage is not the concept “relationship” nor is it simply defined by the male-female relationship. These other kinds of relationships are fundamentally different things. Each can be designated with its own category in civil law, but the “privileges and immunities” and “equal protection” clauses would only apply to and within each separate category.

Homosexual unions are self-evidently not the same as heterosexual marriages. They are different things that serve different ends. The former are about companionship; the latter are about family. To be clear: a same-sex union is something real, it is something unique, it is something important, and it is something that can and should be recognized in contract law, but it is not a marriage. It is something different and should be recognized by government as something different. Different things should be identified, named, and defined differently, and therefore treating different things differently does not violate any principle of equality or equity.

The moral norms, customs, and laws that support marriage are based on tens of thousands of years of human experience with the unique relations between men and women and the families they create. Applying the same norms, customs, and laws to relationships that do not involve a sex difference and its potential for creating new life is like applying the responsibilities of parenthood to those of same-sex friendship: both involve love and loyalty, but they are not the same kind of relationship with the same kind of rules or purposes. Traditional marriage laws do not discriminate against same-sex couples. They are laws and norms that refer to something specific in nature. Such laws have not, should not, and ultimately cannot recognize that which is not marriage without doing harm to what marriage is. Same-sex unions are a different kind of association that involve different kinds of behavior, and which pursue different ends. Hence, they are deserving of different kinds of laws that apply to different kinds of relationships.

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Let us consider three more justice-related claims.

The first we might call the “reparations” argument or the Argument from Guilt, which says that because homosexuals have suffered past discrimination and various injustices, we should therefore give them what they want, which is marriage. Giving homosexuals the right to marry would be a form of social and legal reparations for past suffering. This is an argument that seeks to breathe without oxygen. Philosophically speaking, it can’t and shouldn’t be taken seriously by serious people, although it seems to be the underlying motive for many heterosexuals who support same-sex marriage. It is an argument motivated by an emotion (i.e., guilt), which easily and often turns into a passion (i.e., anger and resentment), the kind of passion that is willing to use State-sanctioned intimidation and violence to overcome historic injustice.

Acting because of guilt would, however, be a grave mistake. Guilt is not and should never be the foundation of justice. Our moral responsibility is to the living and to future generations, which means that we should do everything in our power to eliminate various injustices where they exist and to create and perpetuate a just and free society where we can. Our immediate moral and legal responsibility is to abolish laws that criminalize homosexual, polygamous, and polyamorous relationships. If such couplings and groupings want to establish themselves in permanent or semi-permanent social unions, we should eliminate from our legal system those laws that prohibit such relationships. Furthermore, we should also employ our common-law system to establish new laws that protect the rights of same-sex couples and polygamous and polyamorous groupings. That’s what justice in a free society requires.

A second justice-related claim says that same-sex couples are no different than childless heterosexual couples, which means to treat them differently is unjust. In other words, aren’t infertile couples, for instance, the exception that disproves the rule? Don’t they demonstrate the inconsistency, incoherence, and hypocrisy of the metaphysical view of marriage? If there are no meaningful differences between same-sex couples and infertile heterosexual couples on the metaphysical standard, would it not be an act of arbitrary injustice to exclude homosexuals from marriage? Once again, this faux challenge is a non-starter and easily answered.

The difference between the marital union of an infertile and a fertile heterosexual couple is one of degree only and not one of kind as when compared to a same-sex couple. First, the sexual union of a same-sex couple does not and cannot result in the creation of new life—ever! It is a biological impossibility, and the government knows this fact with absolute certainty, which is one important reason why government does not and should not have a stake in same-sex relationships. By contrast, government must assume that all heterosexual couples can produce offspring, whether they can or not and whether they want to or not. This is so for two reasons.

One, married couples unable to create children at one moment in time are often able to do so at a later period, particularly in today’s world with its remarkable advances in medical technologies and fertility treatments. Likewise, couples that choose not to have children when they first marry can later change their minds, and often do. Two, and more importantly, the government in a free society must never be in the fertility business. The proponents of a free society would not want, nor would they ever permit, the government to conduct background fertility checks of men and women who want to marry. What sane person would support the creation of a government department, agency, or bureau charged with determining the fertility of prospective marriageable couples? What sane person would support government intrusion into the most intimate details and private matters of their personal life and then have the “Federal Bureau of Marriage and Fertility Management” publicly label them as infertile and therefore not marriageable? Such government action would be both immoral and impractical.

Lastly, there are no negative externalities associated with recognizing the marriages of heterosexual couples who are infertile or who chose not to have children. Such marriages are benign; they do not have any negative effects on the institution of marriage; they do not undermine the principal characteristics of marriage (e.g., exclusivity, monogamy, and permanence), nor do they render mothers and fathers superfluous to childrearing. As we shall see momentarily, this is not true with same-sex marriages.

A third justice-related claim (closely related to the second) says that same-sex couples should have the right to adopt children just like heterosexual couples, and, furthermore, that same-sex couples can be just as loving as straight couples. And if homosexuals can adopt and if they can be loving parents, the argument goes, then why should they not be allowed to marry? If a same-sex couple can be parents and if there is “no difference” between same-sex and opposite-sex parenting, then haven’t they met the standard of marriage established by the metaphysical view? To deny homosexuals the right to be parents and to experience the life of parenting is unjust and motivated by homophobic animus. As with the other “justice” claims, this one is dismissed easily.

Let’s start with the obvious. Well, yes, of course, two men or two women can raise, educate, and love children under their care. This is true of heterosexuals and homosexuals. We know that spinsterly aunts and bachelor uncles, and various other heterosexual same-sex combinations, have successfully raised orphaned or abandoned children for eons. And of course, right now in America same-sex couples are successfully raising children. They provide them with a clean home, food on the table, and clothes on their backs. They provide them with love, affection, attention, and discipline. They change diapers, wipe noses, and kiss boo-boos. They drive their kids to soccer games, take them on beach vacations, read to them at night, and, as if to show the world how “normal” they are, they take them to Taylor Swift concerts. Same-sex couples even give their kids curfews, ground them, make them eat broccoli, and chaperone proms. They can do all these things just as well as anyone else. All that goes without saying. But that’s much too easy, and it misses the point.

The question is not whether a same-sex couple is capable or not of loving and raising a child. That is an evasion of a much more important issue. As with so much else in this debate, the real issue is not what is right or best for adults; the fundamental issue is what is best for children. The principal problem with the view that same-sex couples should have equal access to adopted children is that it is seen almost exclusively from an adult-centric perspective. It demonstrates a greater concern for the rights, wants, and feelings of adults than for those of children. It is less about the rights, wants, and needs of children and more about the psychological needs and social status of adults.

When viewed from a child’s perspective, however, the issue looks rather different. Again, the principal question is this: what is best for children?

Let’s examine this question by narrowing it through a series of corollary questions. All things being equal (e.g., family income, relationship stability, parental education, parenting ability, and, most importantly, the amount of love that two people can share with a child), is it better for the socio-psychological development of a child that he or she be raised by a mother and a father or a same-sex couple? Does it matter? Are children entitled to a mother and a father? Do they have a moral claim to speak of their parents as mom and dad? Do we cheat them of their birthright by consciously establishing a policy that may deny them their claim to a mother and a father? Is it an abuse of power for government officials to decide arbitrarily that one orphaned or abandoned child will have a mother and a father but another will have two dads? Do we abuse the most vulnerable and powerless children by depriving them of the experience of a mother and a father?

The current dispensation—the hipster pose—says that the needs and wants of children are irrelevant to the needs and wants of adults. Orphaned and abandoned children or mail-order children created in a petri dish are now to be objectified and treated as little more than created and sold commodities to satisfy the self-esteem needs of grown men and women. But surely children deserve more than to know that their mother was used by their two fathers as nothing more than temporary incubator or that their father was used by their two mothers as nothing more than a sperm-donor who masturbated into a glass jar for the price of an iPhone.

Children have a deep and profound longing and need for a mother and a father. They want to know where they come from and who created them. Their own self-understanding is developed by their experience with and knowledge of the two people with whom they share DNA. If they don’t have that experience and knowledge, they often have a sense of being lost and abandoned. Such children struggle to know who and what they are. Moreover, common sense and universal experience tell us that men and women, mothers and fathers, bring different virtues (and vices) to the task of parenting, and they satisfy the physical, intellectual, and emotional needs of children in different ways. Children require and deserve both. And if they can’t have their natural mother and father, surely it is no discrimination against the children to give them the next best thing: an adoptive mother and father. From a (natural or adoptive) mother and a father, they learn the different gender cues of men and women, and they learn how and how not to treat members of the opposite sex.

What common sense tells us social science confirms. All the social scientific evidence demonstrates clearly and persuasively that children do best when reared by their married biological mother and father. While it is certainly true that some children raised by same-sex couples turn out just fine, on average, children are much more likely to thrive throughout their lives if they are raised by a mom and a dad.

In those tragic situations where children are orphaned, we know that they want to be raised by a mother and a father. All of this can be put to the test quickly and easily. Ask an orphaned or abandoned twelve-year-old child if he would rather be adopted by a homosexual or a heterosexual couple. Ask an orphaned child if he or she would rather be adopted by Bob and Frank or Betty and James. Ask an orphaned child if he’d rather have two moms or a mom and a dad. I think we all know how orphaned children would answer. To not ask children these questions, to not care what they think and want, is to abandon them a second time. No child deserves to be abandoned even once; to be abandoned twice is unnecessarily cruel and unusual. Surely, we should be concerned about the dignity and self-worth of children.

Recognizing marriage as the union of a man and a woman does not therefore deny homosexuals the same basic civil rights accorded to heterosexuals. Governments for thousands of years have not extended this recognition to other kinds of loving relationships, but this was not a violation of rights. No rights have been violated because the government has not initiated physical force against anyone by not redefining marriage to include homosexuals. Governments properly recognize and thereby encourage and support marriage legally because it is an objectively good institution that benefits all people. In fact, marriage is the natural, pre-civil association that makes the principle of rights possible. Alternative romantic unions that seek perpetuity—e.g., polygamous, polyamorous, and homosexual—can and should be recognized and sanctioned by government as different but equal before the law. In other words, homosexual and other kinds of romantic unions can be recognized in law and their forms and formalities can mirror those of marriage, but they should not be recognized as marriage. They should be recognized for what they are, which is something uniquely different. Since homosexual unions bear no relationship to the procreative act, they are disconnected from the metaphysical roots of marriage. Homosexual love may imitate the manners and mores of heterosexual marriages—indeed, as Plato suggests, it may even transcend the love of the heterosexual union—but it cannot share in it.

Equal protection under the law does not mean making the same that which is different. There are existentially meaningful differences (i.e., differences of kind) between heterosexual and homosexual relationships (as I’m told there is between gay and lesbian relationships) that should be discovered, recognized, and respected in law. (The differences, however, between married heterosexual couples with and without children are of degree only.) Because homosexual unions are free from the fact of procreation and because they are built on the ever-changing emotional needs of two people, they cannot know or experience the psychological, moral, and cultural norms that have grown up around true marital unions, which are rooted in the generative act. Without that anchor, same-sex unions are plastic and malleable and therefore don’t require the same moral norms to sustain them. The primary characteristics of marriage (e.g., monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and permanence)—characteristics that are necessary for the survival and wellbeing of marriage—have no fixed metaphysical connection to same-sex relationships and are therefore not necessarily needed for same-sex unions.

It is both reasonable and just to sustain a legal distinction between marriage as heterosexual and all other forms of partnership both heterosexual and homosexual. To demand that homosexual unions be treated as no different from, and equally necessary to society as heterosexual unions—to demand that homosexual unions be guaranteed all of the experiences available to heterosexual unions—to demand that homosexual unions be guaranteed the same kinds of experiences that result from heterosexual procreation, is non-objective, irrational, unjust, illiberal, and, in the end, tyrannical.

The only violation of rights in the current marriage debate comes from those who would use the coercive force of the government to redefine marriage to be something that it is not. As I shall demonstrate in later essays in this series, those who support “marriage equality” are willing to violate the rights of innocent individuals so that their whims and need for recognition are satisfied. In the end, “marriage equality” is not really about equality, equal rights, or “equal protection”; it is about identity politics and the use of political force to celebrate that identity.

Audio recording:

Have a great week!!!

THE GOOD

BRING IT ON! White hydrogen discovered in billion-year-old Canadian Shield rock points to potential new energy source.

COULD NOT HAVE SAID IT BETER MYSELF!

• “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”

• “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

SOCIALISM IS EVIL BOTH MORALLY AND PRACTICALLY. There, I said it! Here’s a very good article on a very bad topic: The Long Tradition of Wealth-Extracting Socialists.

ENDORSED: The government cannot launder speech suppression through private companies and call it constitutional, which is why FIRE backs the JAWBONE Act.

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND UP

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• After Decades, Scientists Have Finally Discovered Tylenol’s Secret Mechanism.

• Stem cells from body fat may repair spinal fractures.

• Reviving Exhausted T Cells Sparks Powerful Cancer Tumor Elimination.

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JUST DON’T BRING YOUR BIG CITY VALUES TO SMALL TOWN AMERICA: The rise of the small city: Population growth in the U.S. has moved beyond urban cores

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SCIENCE ROUND-UP

• Scientists Put a Brain Through a −196°C Cryosleep. Could Real-Life Human Hibernation Change the Future of Deep-Space Travel?

• Scientists have long said we can’t multitask. A new study says we can.

• Scientists Simulated Nuclear Fallout in The Lab And Got a Surprise.

• MIT’s New Dual-Mode Rocket System Could Send Tiny Satellites to Mars.

IT’S AS THOUGH IT WERE A LAW OF SOCIAL PHYSICS OR SOMETHING. If you fund the homeless you get more homeless. Let’s hope HUD ends the funding everywhere: HUD Suspends Federal Homeless Funding to Los Angeles in Wake of Fraud Allegations.

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND-UP

• Lost Parchment Reveals People Who Survived The Black Death.

• Mysterious Stone in US Backyard Turns Out to Be an Archaeological Treasure.

• Your Blood May Carry a 700-Million-Year-Old Secret.

HE REALLY WAS AN INSUFFERABLE, FECKLESS TWAT: Good riddance to Keir Starmer’s tyranny of greyness.

READ OF THE WEEK: The Strange Afterlife of Fascism.

INTERESTING QUESTION: Why is the US Space Force researching ‘orbital warehouses’?

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION OF DRINK: Ten Quotations Highlighting Alcohol’s Intoxicating Influence on the American Revolution.

“LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN”: The Age of Friedman.

WITHER THE DEEP STATE: Supreme Court deals massive blow to Deep State, striking down 90-year precedent

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THE BAD

THE LEFT DIDN’T “GO” WRONG. It was wrong from the moment Karl Marx invented the idea: How the Left Went Wrong--& Why It’s Hard To Reconnect

THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE HUMAN MIND: Using AI for just minutes reduces focus and persistence, new study warns.

CANADA IS IN BIG, BIG TROUBLE (AND YES, IT’S ALWAYS THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES): The Peculiar Institution. What happens when a state builds a medical system it can’t afford and a killing mechanism it can’t stop. A 40-year projection.

YOU’VE BEEN SCAMMED: Far-left Southern Poverty Law Center reimbursed Klan members for cross-burnings: feds.

PSSSST! Who’s going to tell them: In Split With Extremist DSA, 13 Dems Sign Pledge Rejecting Socialism

• Related: Dems Belatedly Realize They’re Being Gutted By Their Socialist Wing

THIS GIVES NEW MEANING TO THE OLD CONCEPT “ROTTEN BOROUGH”: Records confirm 26 people are registered to vote: Address? A porta potty in a vacant space

BUT, BUT, BUT—DO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT FEMINISM IS NOT REALLY WHAT WE WERE TOLD IT WAS? Women of the left and their worship of violence

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES NEVER FAILS: California taxpayers buy tablets used for lewd behavior by inmates

THE PERFECT ENCAPSULATION OF THE 21^ST-CENTURY LEFT: Leftists plan striptease event to raise money for terrorists

WHAT WOULD JOSEF MENGELE SAY? ‘Transgender Experiments On Animals’ Banned In NIH Spending Bill Upon Request Of GOP Lawmakers

THIS DAY WAS ALWAYS COMING: Why Social Security Checks Could Be $500 Less Each Month By 2032

THE CREATORS OF THE WELFARE-ENTITLEMENT STATE WERE EITHER MORONS OR IMMORAL, OR, AS IS MORE LIKELY THE CASE, BOTH: Labor Dept Threatens To Withhold Funds From States Over Unemployment Fraud, Waste

DECLINE AND FALL—ENGLISH STYLE:

• How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi.

• Sorry, Britain, but You’re Just Another Europoor Country Now.

• Rupert Lowe Releases His Rape Gang Report.

• BRITISH RAPE GANG REPORT.

• The UK Goes Full Dystopia As Parts of Europe (Finally) Begin to Fight the New World Goblins.

RADICAL IDEA: Can We PLEASE Stop Mass-Importing Third-World Medieval Butchers?

THIS ARTICLE AND THE STUDY THAT IT HIGHLIGHTS PROVES EVERYTHING THAT I’VE ALWAYS SAID ABOUT MODERN, POST-NEW DEAL LIBERALISM: IT’S A PSYCHOLOGY FIRST BEFORE IT’S A POLITICAL IDEOLOGY (OR MAYBE IT’S THE OTHER WAY ‘ROUND): A New Study Just Confirmed the Left’s Worst-Kept Secret.

NATIONALISM + SOCIALISM = (FILL IN THE ______): Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism.

HERE IS A LAW OF POLITICAL PHYSICS: WHEREVER THERE IS A WELFARE STATE, THERE WILL BE FRAUD: ‘Massive fraud’: Feds charge state officials with rigging $11 billion social services program to ‘siphon’ cash

HERE IS AN IRON LAW OF POLITICS: WHERE THERE IS A WELFARE STATE, THERE WILL BE FRAUD: ‘State sanctioned’ Russian mob ran $1B Medicare scam out of New York, compromised 1M medical records: Feds.

THE CORRUPTION OF A ONCE FABULOUS PLACE: California ‘Decriminalized Voter Fraud,’ Top Federal Prosecutor Warns

ENVIRONMENTALISTS ARE ANTI-SCIENCE, ANTI-LIFE, AND ANTI-CHILDREN—LITERALLY! Over 100,000 Kids Have Died Due to Greenpeace Blocking Genetically Enhanced Rice, New Calculation Shows.

AND THE CAUSE IS . . . ? US Fertility Rate Has Dropped More Than 20% Since 2007

HOW COULD THEY NOT BE: Gallup Poll: 77% Say Founders Would Be Disappointed With US

AND THAT APATHY BEGINS WITH THE PEOPLE RUNNING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THE UTTERLY FECKLESS CONSERVATIVE AND LIBERTARIAN “THINK” TANKS: America Doesn’t Have a Socialist Problem—We Have an Apathy Problem. And apathy is how tiny, terrifying, highly motivated minorities end up running cities.

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THE UGLY

OUR BRAVE NEW WORLD SUCKS! Sir, Why Do You Want Babies To Suck Your Nipples?

ENGLAND IS A PATHETIC AND SOMETIMES DISGUSTING PLACE: The rape of a white girl by 15 Bradford men warrants a full-scale public inquiry.

CRIME OF THE CENTURY:

• You know, in certain older, civilized cultures, When men failed as entirely as you have …

• This is the part that I cannot comprehend. A child is not choosing voluntarily to be a prostitute. A child prostitute is having horrors heaped upon her. The instant response should be mobilization to save the child and bring fury down upon those pimping out the child. And for those not on X: X- Cancel.

THIS LITTLE MAN IS EVIL: ‘Clearly a deception’: Bombshell Fauci text messages reveal shocking admission about COVID shots

ROCKET SCIENCE: ‘Shocking’ study shows link between transgender ideology and left-wing violence.

THE DSA IS TAKING OVER THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY (ALTHOUGH ITS PRINCIPLES HAVE BEEN A PART OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SINCE 1932). BILL KRISTOL IS COMING FULL CIRCLE WITH HIS FATHER’S POLITICAL BEGINNINGS. DSA admits: ‘Our goal is communism’

. . . and THE BEAUTIFUL

“BREAKING HOME TIES” (1954) BY NORMAN ROCKWELL IS ONE OF HIS BEST AND MOST ARRESTING PAINTINGS. It might have just as easily been titled “Saying Goodbye.” I find the painting deeply moving because I’ve had this same experience on three separate occasions. It captures a father’s sadness and sense of loss, and it captures a son’s excitement and sense of hope. The father’s world—as he created it, knew it and loved it—is coming to an end. He’s losing someone he loves deeply. His pain is palpable. The son’s world is about to change because it means leaving home and his parents. The boy can now live out his dreams for the future, leaving the father with his past.

HAVE A GREAT WEEK!

*My apologies for the sparse production of The Redneck Intellectual these past two months. My life has been, well, complicated. For example, I went to Phoenix, AZ to deliver eight lectures for Peterson Academy, drove to Canada to be with my dying mother, hosted a two-week intellectual boot camp for graduate students to study the history, ideas, and institutions of the American Founding (the John Adams Fellows Program), am in the process of creating a new academic department at Clemson (to be known as “The Lyceum”), and am writing proposals and doing the administrative groundwork to create a new center at Clemson for the study of the American Founding.

**I’d like to thank my paid subscribers for sticking with me during this challenging time. Your support is deeply appreciated. I have a lot more great content to come.

***A young colleague of mine produced the following video. I’m curious to know what all of you think. Does it work? (As you think about it, just remember that if we were to produce more videos like this one, we would target multiple audiences, including if not most especially high school students.)

I would be grateful for your comments. Doubly grateful if you would share.

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DUMB & DUMBER 135

K-12 EDITION

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION HAS BEEN A DISASTER FOR AMERICA: The progressive education machine is collapsing. We should let it fall

REFORM IS NOT THE ANSWER. Abolition is the only answer: The Left’s relentless control of education

WAKE-UP AMERICA: Parents as tyrants? New education buzzword said to move beyond DEI

I’M NOT SURE WHAT THIS TITLE MEANS!?!?! DOESN’T THE DSA ALREADY CONTROL AMERICA’S CHILDREN VIA THE SO-CALLED “ED” SCHOOLS? NYC Democrat Socialists Say They’re Coming For The School Kids

YOU JUST MIGHT WANT TO TRY HOMESCHOOLING:

THE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS: WHERE SOME TEACHERS GO TO BE TITILLATED: School district under investigation for allegedly requiring students of same sex to kiss in front of class

#JUST_WALK_AWAY: Family withdraws from school after fourth graders shown LGBTQ content without warning

OF COURSE THEY DID, BECAUSE THEY’RE THUGS: Teachers union uses felons to attack school choice in Arizona.

HIGHER ED EDITION

AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION IS A CLOWN SHOW! Did you know it cost $96,480 to attend Trinity College per year. Trinity College course will teach students to ‘unsettle’ the ‘white gaze.’

AND WHAT DOES CONSERVATISM-LIBERTARIANISM INC. HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THIS? George Washington summer program grooms middle school students for progressive activism.

DEFUND NOW: DEI bureaucrats are part of the problem, but the deeper threat is an entire administrative class built to investigate, regulate, and punish dissent. Higher education needs fewer ideological enforcers and more defenders of open inquiry.

THERE ARE MANY FACTORS FOR THIS, NOT THE LEAST OF WHICH IS THAT IT’S INTENTIONAL: Most College Students Lack Basic US Civics Knowledge, Survey Says

HEY, JEWISH STUDENTS: LEAVE THE FORMER SO-CALLED “IVY LEAGUE AND C’MON DOWN TO THE NEW AND TRUE IVY LEAGUE (IF YOU HAVE THE ACADEMIC CHOPS, THAT IS): Jewish students, come here to the South — where you’ll be safe.

AMERICA’S UNIVERSITIES REALLY DO NEED TO BE DEFUNDED: Even the left is now flagging the gross bias at America’s universities.

SAY WHAT?!?!?!? Education Department portal reveals $72B in foreign funding to US colleges.

WELL, THERE IT IS FOLKS. Do I need to say anything more. The real question, though, might be this: what is the Cato Institute doing to fix the problem, or is it producing more white papers on legalizing pot or free-market transportation policy? Gen Z Americans fail to correctly answer 6 of 7 basic civics questions

YUP AND ALONG WITH MANY OTHER IMMORAL THINGS: College campuses are ground zero for ‘the gospel of envy.’

AGREED, ESPECIALLY IN THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES: Most Academic Research Should Stop

THE DAY OF RECKONING APPROACHETH: Our campuses are corrupt — and higher education is due for its comeuppance.

ANALYSIS CORRECT: The Politicization of Scholarship

AND YET IT IS: Higher Ed’s Politicization Doesn’t Need to Be

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DUMB & DUMBER 136

K-12 EDITION

THE GOVERNMENT SCHOOL SYSTEM IS A MONEY LAUNDERING ENTERPRISE: Education fraud sweeping the nation

THE TIME HAS COME: YOU HAVE A MORAL OBLIGATION TO GET YOUR KIDS OUT OF THE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS. If you don’t, it’s on you! Taxpayer-funded trans dolls with removable genitalia to hit classrooms this fall for kids as young as 4 to ‘learn about different options’.

THOSE WHO KNOW ABOUT THESE THINGS KNOW THAT IT’S BEEN DELIBERATE FOR A LONG TIME: Deliberately Dumbing Down.

IF YOU’RE SURPRISED BY THIS, YOU ARE NAÏVE AT BEST: Southern Poverty Law Center Has Been Indoctrinating Our Teachers.

PATHETIC: Massachusetts principal apologizes to Arab students after lesson on Holocaust.

THE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS ARE GOING TO TEACHING WHAT THE GOVERNMENT WANTS, AND THE GOVERNMENT WANTS YOU TO HATE FREEDOM AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION: How ideologues indoctrinate your children with the connivance of the state.

IT WAS INTENTIONAL: How ‘social studies’ committees spent a century dulling boys’ minds

HIGHER ED EDITION

PRAYING: The University As We Know It Is Finished

AI CHEATING HAS FORCED HIGHER EDUCATION TO RETHINK EVERYTHING: Brown University professor bans take-home exams after mass cheating.

GENDER STUDIES IS A BOGUS ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE AND SHOULD BE ABOLISHED: North Carolina university gender studies minor sees enrollment decline.

I BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE: College sex imbalance is hurting family formation, expert says.

SORT OF LIKE SOVIET UNIVERSITIES IN THE 1920s: Study finds nearly 90 percent of students fake progressive views to appease liberal professors.

NOT AT CLEMSON’S LYCEUM PROGRAM: College students’ academic readiness falls as universities expand support programs.

***Have a great week!

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THINGS FALL APART FOR CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY AND “PROFESSOR” JASON ARDAY.

This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years.

If Cambridge University—an 817-year-old institution—is to be saved (and it’s an open question as to whether it can or even should be saved), all those administrators and faculty involved in hiring, promoting, and defending Jason Arday should be fired immediately. Nothing less will do if Cambridge is to survive.

The great tragedy of the L’Affaire Arday is that there may very well be scores if not hundreds of similar cases around the English-speaking world.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF CAMBRIDGE STARTS HERE.

Watch Professor Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, fawn all over Arday and say to him: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do!!!!!!!” I’ve never seen anything so cringeworthy in my life. It’s just so pathetic:

LET’S START FROM THE BEGINNING

For those not familiar with the Jason Arday story, I tasked Mr. Grok with the following assignment: “List the fantastical claims made by Jason Arday?”

Here’s what Mr. Grok reported, which sums up everything I’ve learned about Arday over the course of the last week:

“Jason Arday (a former University of Cambridge sociology professor who resigned in August 2026 amid plagiarism allegations (the plagiarism consisted of directly copying over 100 pages from another dissertation) and scrutiny of his background) has been widely reported to have made numerous extraordinary or unverified claims about his life, achievements, and experiences.

Key claims include but are not limited to:

• Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at age 3; non-verbal until age 11 and unable to read or write until age 18.

• Extreme athletic feats: Running 600 miles (roughly Edinburgh to London) in six days for charity (a near-world-record ultra-distance performance); alternatively or additionally, running 300 miles in three days; and completing 30 marathons in 35 days (including the final nine after an epileptic fit and hairline fracture of the fibula that caused severe swelling, managed with painkillers and ice baths).

• Charity fundraising: Personally raising £5–£5.5 million (or more) for 70–80+ charities over years, often tied to the running events.

• Threats and attacks after his Cambridge appointment: Being threatened twice by masked men (once at knifepoint) demanding he resign, with no CCTV evidence; receiving a severed pig’s head at his family’s home (falsely claiming a police investigation); and receiving bananas, bullets, corrosive substances, and other items via post, plus physical assaults, spitting, and rape/death threats.

• Television appearance: Being featured in the documentary series Seven Up! as a child. The original series began in 1964 (Arday was born in 1985), and the BBC rejected involvement in related later series given his age.

• Academic credentials and roles: visiting roles at Ohio State University (no records found); and authoring a book titled Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse (Palgrave—publisher confirmed a proposal but no publication).

• Other experiences: Traveling to South America and West Africa to install water points (WaterAid noted they do not send volunteers abroad and do not facilitate self-funded visits); being hit by a car as a teenager, spending months in a (conscious) coma, being told he might not recover (with suggestions to withdraw life support), and relearning to walk/talk (details varied or omitted between book proposal and memoir); testicular cancer or multiple brain tumors (details inconsistent or omitted); and appearing to claim involvement in Olympic-related activities or other feats.”

HERE IS THE JASON ARDAY NEWS ROUNDUP:

• DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge

• Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor.

• Cambridge Professor Jason Arday’s Ohio State Affiliation Appears Fabricated.

• Police investigated journalist who tried to expose Cambridge professor.

• Charity casts doubts on volunteering record of Cambridge professor.

• Now THREE universities dispute claims Cambridge plagiarism row professor holds academic positions with them - as charity casts doubt on volunteering record

• Jason Arday reported academic critic to police after questions over his research

• Star Scholar Resigns as Cambridge Announces Investigation Into His Record

• WHO HAD TO LOSE FOR JASON ARDAY TO WIN?

• The police. Universities. Our national broadcaster. Publishing. Charities. And, of course, Labour... The surreal ‘plagiarising Professor’ scandal exposes in chilling detail just how many of our institutions have now been captured by woke dogma

• Great and Unfortunate Fabrications

• Icarus in the Faculty Lounge

NOTE THE ATTEMPTED COVER-UP BELOW:

AND IT ONLY GETS WORSE!

AND SO, IT ENDS!

TO BE CLEAR: THIS POST IS NOT PRIMARILY ABOUT JASON ARDAY.

It’s about the corruption and rot at the heart of Cambridge University. Here is a partial list of courses currently being taught at Cambridge University. This is the real scandal at Cambridge U:

• Traditional Cultural Norms, Technology and Gender Relations in Ghana

• The Political Economy of Female Circumcision

• Unsexed beings: constructing gender, humanness, and agency through the use of the word “unsex” in Late Modern British society and writing

• In Her Own Words: A Study of Women’s Voices in Contemporary White Supremacy and Far-Right Online Hate

• Legal Mobilization by Black Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer (LBQ) Womxn in Kenya and South Africa

• Exploring gendered embodiment in transgender and gender-diverse adolescents at the intersection of exercise and eating behaviours, social inclusion, and mental health: Towards a desire-centred approach in paediatric gender-affirming healthcare and research

• Codes of Life, Codes of Death: Tracing the (Im)possibility of Trans Lives in Algorithmic Assemblages

• Queer Cultural Memory in Literature, Film and Television since 1999

• The Sexually Sociological: Gay Masculinity, Intimacy and the (Un)queer State

AND NOW WE KNOW, THANKS TO ERIC RASMUSEN, WHO HIRED ARDAY.

The wall of shame:

I SUPPORT THE FOLLOWING UNRESERVEDLY:

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU WATCH THIS INTERVIEW WITH KATHLEEN STOCK. She nails it.

AND MORE:

FROM PHILOSOPHER STEPHEN HICKS. The hall of shame: Jason Arday’s prominent supporters at Cambridge University and elsewhere.

IT’S A SLIPPERY SLOPE TO THE BOTTOM? The Tip of the Iceberg

AFTER 817 YEARS, IT IS SAD TO WITNESS THE DECLINE AND FALL OF A ONCE GREAT UNIVERSITY:

• Can Cambridge weather the Arday storm? Whatever happened to serious scholarship?

• Cambridge University’s Disgrace

THE CORRUPTION RUNS DEEP:

LAST THOUGHTS FROM BRET WEINSTEIN AND PETER BOGHOSSIAN:

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY IS A FRAUDULENT INSTITUTION JUST LIKE THE UNIVERSITIES IN AMERICA’S SO-CALLED “IVY LEAGUE.” (Remember the Claudine Gay scandal at Harvard.)

THE QUESTION IS: WHAT WILL BE DONE ABOUT IT?

• Dons call for Cambridge leaders to take blame for Jason Arday appointment

• Cambridge Can — but Evidently Won’t — Catch Jason Arday.

• Arday’s students think Cambridge failed them. Now they want their grades reviewed.

• Cambridge professors who hired Arday attacked ‘whiteness’ in education

• Cambridge is culpable in plagiarism row

• Jason Arday and the Dukes and Dauphins of DEI

• The genius of Jason Arday

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I conclude with one last thought: the Jason Arday scandal is one of the best possible things to happen to higher education in my lifetime.

But let’s make this clear: the Arday scandal is not primarily about Jason Arday; it’s about the corruption of Cambridge University and indeed of all higher education. Arday is, to be sure, a fraudster and a grifter, but his crime is to have exploited a totally corrupt system. The “system”—the system of DEI welfarism—is the greater crime. The faculty and administrators who hired and promoted him are intellectual and moral malefactors who have stolen something important from us. They deserve to be fired. They do not belong in the hallowed halls of academia.

I’m not at all confident that Cambridge will fix the problem. They will appoint a “committee” or a “commission” to investigate and two-years later the committee will bury the report and do nothing. It’s all a charade.

Let’s be clear: there is NO systemic racism in higher education, at least not the kind that they want you to think exists. Quite the opposite. There is, instead, a kind of fawning, sycophantic but ultimately demeaning treatment of black scholars that is, as black scholar John McWhorter put it, “a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.” Just so! So yes, there is racism at Cambridge, just not the kind they want you to think exists. It’s the racism of low expectations, the racism of guilt, and the racism of revenge.

But the new, systemic racism is more than about the pursuit of some form of perverted virtue as McWhorter suggests. Hilary Cremin, the Chair of the Education School at Cambridge and Arday’s chief promoter (she’s the fawning woman in the BBC documentary above who said Arday “was the best in the world”), was clearly looking for redemption—the kind of redemption that relieves one of an overwhelming sense of guilt. You can see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice when she tells Arday that he is the “best in the world.” Jason Arday was hired and sanctified by racists, who are morally responsible for his rise, decline, and fall. They nailed him to the cross.

Arday’s career is ruined. He should sue Cambridge for having hired him!

And so, I think we should all say “thank you” to Jason Arday. We owe him a debt of gratitude for exposing the intellectual and moral rot not only at Cambridge University, but in all higher education in the English-speaking world.

I think the only proper ending to this story would be for King Charles to knight him as Sir Jason of Cambridge. Surely he deserves that much!

***Have a great week!

I would be deeply appreciative if you would share this essay far and wide. To that end, I’m making the audio version of this essay available to all subscribers, paid and unpaid.

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The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, though well known, does not receive the attention it deserves. Let us remind ourselves of the words and ominous cadence of the Declaration’s all-too-neglected opening sentence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The better-known second sentence, the one that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . ” receives most of the attention in any serious discussion of the Declaration’s core philosophic principles. The first sentence is, however, quite extraordinary in that it announces the moral impulse and moral logic that caused the American people to declare their independence from their mouther country and the world’s greatest military power.

The first sentence introduces in abstract form the Declaration’s purpose and the actions that follow therefrom. Its purpose is to identify and “declare” to the world the “causes which impel” the colonists to separate from Great Britain, and its actions are defined by the necessity to dissolve their connection to the mother country. By publicly declaring the “causes” which impel them to the separation and by showing their “respect to the opinions of mankind,” American revolutionaries demonstrated that their actions were to be guided by reasoned discourse and moral principles. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Americans appealed to nature (i.e., to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God) as the standard of moral and political right, and they appealed to man’s reason as the means of knowing and demonstrating those principles.

According to the Declaration’s first sentence, man’s reason is capable of apprehending three important things: first, the evidentiary facts that prove a design on the part of British imperial officials to enslave them; second, the moral standard against which these unjust acts are to be judged; and third, the necessity of separation. The overarching principle of the Declaration’s first sentence is that reason can distinguish between right and wrong, just and unjust, freedom and tyranny.

The main burden of the Declaration was to demonstrate that the actions of King George III and the British Parliament necessarily amounted to despotism. From the beginning of the imperial crisis, the most impressive American minds charged British authorities with a “design” to enslave them. As early as 1765, John Adams raised the alarm in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law in response to the Stamp Act: “Nothing less than this seems to have been meditated for us, by somebody or other in Great Britain. There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.” Likewise, Thomas Jefferson warned in his 1774 Summary View of the Rights of British-America that “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period, and pursued, unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” And according to the Declaration, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

To “prove” to a “candid world” the charge that there was indeed a design to impose a tyranny over the American colonies, the Declaration enumerates twenty-seven injuries and usurpations allegedly committed by the king. Each of the charges refers to a specific action taken or not taken by the king. The list of injuries and usurpations can be divided into three main sections.

The first section—counts one through twelve—enumerates the king’s abuse of his executive powers. His offenses include disallowing or suspending colonial legislation, dissolving colonial legislatures, obstructing the colonial system of justice, corrupting the separation of powers by making judges dependent on his will, and keeping standing armies. The second section—counts thirteen through twenty-two—details the king’s collusion with Parliament to subject the colonies “to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.” His offense here was having not vetoed Parliament’s abuses, such as: quartering British troops in America and putting them above criminal law, restricting American trade, restricting trial by jury and other common law rights, imposing taxes without the consent of the governed, and destroying the colonists’ right to self-government. Of special significance is the charge that Parliament has declared its power to be arbitrary in America through the passage of the Declaratory Act of 1766. The third section—counts twenty-three through twenty-seven—identifies those abuses that amount to an undeclared state of war. The king’s abuses include what might be described as war atrocities: he has initiated the use of physical force by turning his navy and army against the lives and property of the colonists.

In sum, George III had violated the British constitution, the colonial charters, common-law rights and liberties, and, most importantly the colonists’ natural rights to life, liberty, property, and their pursuit of happiness. In response, the Americans did not view these actions as discrete and separate events unconnected from each other. They were not concrete-bound pragmatists. The Americans studied, weighed, and measured the separate actions of king and Parliament (i.e., the evidence of the crime); they integrated the totality of British actions and drew the conclusion that king and Parliament had a “design” (i.e., the motive) to reduce them under absolute despotism (i.e., the ultimate crime itself); and then they contrasted the actions of British imperial officials with their own moral principles (i.e., the standards of natural justice).

In 1768, John Dickinson in his famous Letters from a Farmer described perfectly the Americans’ mode of reasoning: “Ought not the People therefore to watch? to observe facts? to search into causes? to investigate designs? And have they not a right of Judging from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness?” The revolutionaries’ Enlightenment moral principles provided the touchstone by which to judge the actions of king and Parliament, and their principles necessitated the nature of their response.

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The American Spirit of Liberty

Returning now to the Declaration’s first sentence, let us ask: Why in the course of events from 1765 to 1776 did it become “necessary” for the Americans to dissolve their political connection to their king and mother country?

To say that separation is necessary is to say that it must be, but why must it be? Imagine how the meaning of the Declaration would have changed if Jefferson had not written “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary . . .” but instead substituted “optional,” “possible,” “expedient,” “preferable,” or even “prudent” for the word “necessary.” To repeat: Why was separation said to be necessary?

Our entry point for examining why this was so is a phrase the Americans of the 1760s and 1770s invoked repeatedly: the “spirit of liberty.” The phrase “spirit of liberty” united theory and practice for America revolutionaries; it implied an action in defense of a principle; it was characterized by certain virtues in defense of liberty. The spirit of American liberty is a sentiment, a mindset, a disposition, a virtue. As a sentiment, it loves freedom and hates slavery. As a mindset, it is watchful, suspicious, and skeptical. As a disposition, it is active, jealous, restless, resolute, protective, and, most of all, vigilant. And as a virtue, it is defined by integrity, fortitude, perseverance, courage, and patriotism.

The American spirit of liberty was virtually synonymous with the colonists’ moral constitutions, and it provided them with a worldview through which they interpreted and responded to the cascade of events between 1764 and 1776. No theme ran as broadly or deeply through American culture in the 1760s and 1770s. The colonists’ spirit of liberty served as a kind of moral and psychological tripwire that was first triggered by the passage of the Stamp Act and kept active with the passage of every piece of British legislation aimed at the Americans in the decade leading up to 1776. During these years, American Whigs developed objective standards by which to measure the justice and injustice of British legislation. These standards, when combined with their spirit of liberty, provided the Americans with an early-warning system that alerted them day or night to the abuse or growth of arbitrary power. That early-warning system was most famously expressed in Paul Revere’s galloping words—“The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming!”—during his midnight ride on April 18, 1775, to warn American minutemen of British troop movements before the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Rekindling and stoking the spirit of American liberty became a central theme repeated countlessly in the writings of leading American Patriots. Let us consider just one example of how American revolutionaries thought about the spirit of liberty.

In 1767, John Dickinson penned his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which many historians regard as one of the most influential pamphlets of the Revolutionary period. Dickinson’s Letters present a powerful analysis of the ways in which unchecked power asphyxiates liberty. The letters also provide the best analysis of the American spirit of liberty written during the Revolutionary period.

Dickinson’s primary concern in the Letters was to sound the alarm against the Townshend Acts, particularly the New York Suspending Act and the Townshend duties. The Americans, he warned, must be vigilant and exert “the most watchful attention” against Parliament’s subtle designs; they must prevent a creeping form of slavery under the guise of legalities, otherwise “a new servitude may be slipped upon us, under the sanction of usual and respectable terms.” He goes on to warn against those “artful rulers” who attempt to “extend their power beyond its just limits” by subtly manipulating language and legal technicalities. And with every passing generation the noose tightened just a little bit more. Every usurpation, whether large or small, eventually requires additional usurpations to keep all prior usurpations in force: “A free people therefore can never be too quick in observing, nor too firm in opposing the beginnings of alteration either in form or reality, respecting institutions formed for their security. The first kind of alteration leads to the last: Yet, on the other hand, nothing is more certain, than that the forms of liberty may be retained, when their substance is gone.” Thus, it was necessary, Dickinson argued, that the people should always be on guard to protect their liberty as they protect their property. He encouraged them to “watch,” “observe facts,” “search into causes,” and “investigate designs,” and of course he insisted that they assert their “right of judging from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness.” He implored his fellow Americans to be ever vigilant. Quoting from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Dickinson reminded his readers that “slavery is ever preceded by sleep.”

Dickinson equated the American spirit of liberty with jealousy, watchfulness, and vigilance. “A perpetual jealousy, respecting liberty is,” he told the American people, “absolutely, requisite in all free states.” They must keep up the “utmost vigilance,” and they must be “watchful of their liberty.” He went on to remind his fellow colonists of Machiavelli’s famous chapter in Discourses on Livy, which “prove that a state, to be long lived, must be frequently corrected, and reduced to its first principles.” The lesson of all history proves “that every free state should incessantly watch, and instantly take alarm on any addition being made to the power exercised over them.”

Dickinson attacked the Townshend duties precisely because they were so comparatively small. It would be a “fatal error,” he warned, to disregard and therefore to acquiesce in these new duties because of their trifling amount. In fact, the “smallness” of the duties is a trap. No matter how inconsequential the tax, no matter how reasonably and equitably applied, the colonists should regard the act with “abhorrence.” He suggested that the Townshend duties were intentionally designed to be small so that the Americans would not notice or object and a noose-tightening precedent could therefore be established. He went on to posit that the British were testing the moral disposition of the colonists. He then raised the very real possibility that the goal of the British imperial officials in establishing such a small tax was to establish a “precedent, whereupon the future vassalage of these colonies may be established.” Once the precedent was established, Dickinson argued, Parliament might then levy any amount of tax on the colonists. Thus, it was imperative that the colonists resist every attempt to tax them without their consent regardless of the size or amount.

The Townshend Act “is founded,” according to Dickinson, “on the destruction” of the colonists’ “constitutional security.” If members of Parliament “have a right to levy a tax of one penny upon us,” Dickinson noted, then “they have a right to levy a million upon us.” What this means, of course, is that the possession and control of American property depended not on the will of the colonists and their rights but on the pleasure of Parliament. The Townshend duties are clearly a tax, Dickinson concluded, and “Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore—slaves.” The logic of Dickinson’s moral reasoning was simple, compelling, motivating, and explanatory. It’s what made the American revolutionary mind unique and distant from the twenty-first-century way of thinking. This idea of preserving natural liberty in its pristine form and so resisting even one small precedent against it had come close to the center of the American consciousness. This idea is precisely why the colonists viewed the rather trifling stamp tax and Townshend duties so ominously: they viewed each as the entering wedge of a broader campaign to deprive them of rights and liberties.

Like modern historians, British imperial officials never understood the principles, temperament, and character of the American revolutionaries, which meant they never understood their deepest motives. They had no way to know that the revolution’s trigger was embedded in the spirit of American liberty. British officials therefore could never understand why it was necessary for the Americans to dissolve the political bands that had connected them to Britain for over 150 years. Likewise, twenty-first century Americans who still revere the revolutionaries’ spirit of liberty are beckoned to recover the moral impulse and moral logic that drove their ideological ancestors to independence and freedom.

Happy Independence Day!!! Long live the United State of America!

***I’m off to Arizona next week to give eight lectures on “The Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution” for Jordan Peterson’s online education platform, Peterson Academy. If you’re in the Phoenix area and would like to attend, you can sign up here. I may then be off to Canada to visit my parents and when I get back, we launch our two-week “intellectual boot camp,” the John Adams Fellows Program. All of that is to say, my publications for the next month may be less than regular.

The audio recording of “Postmodern Marriage” is at the bottom, and I am making it available to all subscribers, paid and unpaid.

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Now that we’ve examined what marriage is (see here, here, and, most importantly, here), we should consider what marriage is not. There are many pretenders to the throne, but marriage is something definite, something real, and something worth defending. There are those, however, who would use the idea of marriage as a Trojan Horse to corrupt and destroy the meaning, importance, and living reality of what marriage is.

We live in a postmodern age that seeks to change or destroy the core principles and institutions that are at the foundation not just of the West but of all civilizations. Under the long shadow cast by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Herbert Marcuse, we live in a time of nihilistic totalitarianism (nihilism is the means and totalitarianism is the end) that has as its direct goal the dismantling of those ways of living grounded in metaphysical reality.

Let’s begin by putting our concerns in a broader context. Those who seek to destroy marriage, do so in the name of an ideological passion.

When early twentieth-century Marxists realized that there would never be a proletarian revolution of oppressed workers because the working class was the greatest conservator of the bourgeois way of life, they recalibrated their strategy and decided that the values most important to the working class would have to be destroyed first and foremost. This led the twentieth-century Left on its “long march through the institutions” to extinguish those moral values and institutions that were suppressing and holding back the Marxist-Leninist revolution foretold by the laws of dialectical materialism. That’s when the Left discovered Nietzsche and Freud and began to wheedle away at the soul of Western man.

After the Left captured and transformed the universities, schools, media, Hollywood, and various professional associations, etc., they went for civilization’s jugular. The single greatest scalp won by the Left in the last twenty years has been their corruption and transformation of the institution of marriage. The postmodern Left is now giggling as their minions have stripped marriage of its necessary component parts and left it corpse dangling for all to see and mock. (Apologies for mixing my metaphors!)

The postmodern view of marriage is radically different from the reality of metaphysical marriage. They are essentially different things. Indeed, the difference between marriage and all other forms of romantic association (e.g., same-sex, polygamous, polyamorous, inter-species, etc.) is not one of degree but one of kind. They are not identical or even similar kinds of relationships; indeed, postmodern unions are a simulacrum of true marriage. The metaphysical and postmodern views differ over the purpose of marriage as well as its fundamental characteristics and functions.

Let’s take a closer look.

Marriage true and false can be distinguished in two major ways. First, in contrast to the metaphysical view of marriage, the new postmodern definition is thoroughly subjectivist in nature. It is not grounded in the facts of reality. It does not refer to a basic human reality with a defined identity, structure, function, and purpose. Indeed, it is disconnected from the necessary facts of reality that give rise to marriage in the first instance and is thus emptied of the necessary content and meaning that define marriage. Postmodern marriage is infinitely malleable. Its purpose is, according to its most vocal proponents, to serve an ideological-political agenda.

To start with, the postmodern view says that marriage is genderless; that a wedding does not require a bride (which must, by definition, be a woman) and a groom (which must, by definition, be a man), that a husband does not require a wife; that a child does not require a mother (which must, by definition, be a woman) or a father (which must, by definition, be a man). Nor is the postmodern view of marriage defined by the magic number, two. The new understanding defines marriage as the union of one or more consenting adults. (In 2012, a woman married herself in Las Vegas.) Lastly, the postmodern view of marriage regards the old-fashioned characteristics that once defined marriage, such as monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence, as outdated and therefore optional. In fact, according to Elizabeth Brake, a professor at the University of Calgary, a major goal of postmodern marriage is, as she said, to “denormalize heterosexual monogamy as a way of life.” Thus, the postmodern view is open to married “throuples” (a three-person couple), and of course polygamous and polyamorous marriages, “monogamish” couples who limit their marriage to two people but who are permitted to have sexual relations outside their marriage, and limited-term or temporary marriages as defined by “wedleases.”

But if marriage is not between one man and one woman, by what principle can it be defined and limited? Why should it be thought of as something particular, as something with defined characteristics that distinguish it from all other forms of romantic relationships? Postmodern marriage is therefore a fill-in-the-blank institution, and of course it is the loudest voices and government officials who fill in the blanks. Judith Stacey, one of its leading academic proponents, ably summed up the postmodern view of marriage:

If we begin to value the meaning and quality of intimate bonds over their customary forms, there are few limits to the kinds of marriage and kinship patterns people might wish to devise. . . . Two friends might decide to marry without basing their bond on erotic or romantic attachment. . . . Or, more radical still, perhaps some might dare to question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek some of the benefits of extended family life through small-group marriages arranged to share resources, nurturance, and labor.

The postmodern view is grounded on emotional needs, feelings, and desires; its principal function is to satisfy intimacy and commitment; and its ultimate purpose is to promote self-esteem and to acquire social and political status in a world governed by the tastes of the notoriously hip and the congenitally envious.

The postmodern view of marriage was first sanctioned legally in a 1993 opinion of the Supreme Court of Hawaii, which declared, “This court construes marriage as “‘a partnership to which both partners bring their financial resources as well as their individual energies and efforts.’” According to Andrew Sullivan, one of the leading “conservative” proponents of the postmodern view, marriage is nothing more than the vehicle by “which two adults affirm their emotional commitment to one another.” Marriage in the new dispensation is defined simply as companionship, as an emotional union, as a partnership, or as a super-duper friendship.

Postmodern marriage is about one or more people who love themselves or each other or who share a strong emotional bond formalizing a long-term commitment to one’s self or to one another, a commitment that lasts as long as it suits the feelings and interests of the adults involved. The definition of marriage has changed in Andrew Sullivan’s view: “From being a means to bringing up children” to being “a way in which two adults affirm their emotional commitment to one another.” Elsewhere, Sullivan has written that “the essence of a good marriage is not breeding or even the romantic love that can blind us while it overwhelms us,” but rather “a unique and profound friendship.” But if companionship is the definition of marriage, then there simply are no limits on what marriage can or should be except that some people should feel a strong emotional union with oneself, with another person, or with many people.

Marriage defined as partnership, friendship, or companionship does not explain, however, the deeper purposes of postmodern marriage. Andrew Sullivan captured the meaning of those deeper purposes when he wrote in Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality that unless gay marriage is legalized “a whole segment of humanity” will be denied “personal dignity.” Sullivan’s argument—hereby dubbed the argument from guilt—received official sanction in 2003 when the Ontario Court of Appeals’ decided in a case that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms required that same-sex couples be issued marriage licenses:

Marriage is, without dispute, one of the most significant forms of personal relationships. . . . Through the institution of marriage, individuals can publicly express their love and commitment to each other. Through this institution, society publicly recognizes expressions of love and commitment between individuals, granting them respect and legitimacy as a couple. This public recognition and sanction of marital relationships reflect society’s approbation of the personal hopes, desires and aspirations that underlie loving, committed conjugal relationships. This can only enhance an individual’s sense of self-worth and dignity.

The new postmodern definition of marriage, then, is about promoting the “self-worth and dignity” of people who engage in a certain kind of partnership, friendship, or companionship. In other words, postmodern marriage is driven by a kind of identity politics, the purpose of which is to elevate the “self-worth and dignity” of a protected class. But surely dignity and self-worth are not defined by social recognition, sanction, and approbation. As much as I wanted to compete in the Olympics when I was a young man, the fact that I didn’t in no way damaged my dignity and self-worth. Finally, as a married man, I can assure you that neither my dignity nor my self-worth is connected to my being married. My wife makes sure of that!

In sum, there is no relationship between marriage and human dignity, nor is marriage a “human right.” Self-esteem is not the basis of marriage, nor should unearned guilt be the means by which a counterfeit concept corrupts a legitimate one.

It should be obvious by now that the argument for same-sex marriage is fundamentally incoherent. If feelings, companionship, love, and self-esteem are the defining ingredients of marriage, if marriage is a fill-in-the-blank institution, on what grounds would you not recognize polygamous, polyamorous, and non-sexual unions as marriage? Other than sheer bigotry, why should marriage be limited to the number 2? Why shouldn’t a bisexual man marry a man and a woman if that’s his and their choice? Why shouldn’t a “throuple” be allowed to adopt children? Other than sheer bigotry, why shouldn’t five men and five women be allowed to marry? Why shouldn’t the ten people of a polyamorous marriage be allowed to adopt children? Other than sheer bigotry, why shouldn’t a man or a woman be allowed to marry his or her sister, brother, mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, adult son or daughter, or another married person if they claim to be in love? Other than traditional taboos, why shouldn’t a father and an adult son be allowed to marry and adopt if they love each other? Other than sheer bigotry, why shouldn’t two heterosexual sisters be allowed to marry for the benefits that accrue with marriage? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to adopt? Surely such a prohibition represents discrimination and a violation of the “privileges and immunities,” “due process,” and “equal protection” clauses of the 14th Amendment, according to the proponents of postmodern marriage.

Other than sheer bigotry and old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy taboos, why should we not celebrate such relationships? In fact, why shouldn’t we be required or even forced to celebrate such relationships? Surely it is immoral to state a moral preference for one form of family arrangement over another. If male and female are not immutable characteristics of marriage, why should number, exclusivity, permanence, choice, or even species limit marriage? Presumably the only forbidden form of marriage would be to oneself, but then again, why not? And in fact, such a wedding has, as we’ve seen already, occurred recently. And why should marriage be limited to persons? Why can’t we have interspecies marriages? If we can kill and eat animals, surely a humane society would allow us to love and marry animals? This may sound absurd but there are individuals who want to marry animals and have either done so or attempted to do so. Several years ago, a man in Missouri sought a license to marry his horse. And in 2006, a British woman, Sharon Tendler, married a male dolphin named Cindy. (It is not known if “Cindy” is transgendered.) Tendler made it clear that she did not expect Cindy to be monogamous. And why should marriage be limited to sentient beings? In 2013, a woman in France married a 500-year-old bridge.

Ultimately, the postmodern definition of marriage is open-ended and therefore unintelligible. It has no objective referents other than whims and feelings; in fact, it represents an attempt to rewrite reality. But a concept that means everything means nothing. Ultimately, the argument for same-sex marriage is a case of ideological wish-fulfillment.

Second, if the postmodern view is simply the product of human will, wish, and whim unconnected to any metaphysical realities or necessities, it necessarily follows that the postmodernists see marriage as something created and defined by government (i.e., jus dare), which means it is the creature of force. And of course, that which government has the power to create and define can also be recreated and redefined by government at will. This means that government can change at its pleasure the identity, function, and meaning of marriage, including the sex and number of those marrying as well as the other fundamental characteristics of marriage, e.g., exclusivity, monogamy, and permanence.

In 1648, the 2^nd Earl of Pembroke famously said, “A parliament can do any thing but make a man a woman, and a woman a man.” The postmodern view says nonsense to that, and so has the British Parliament in the twenty-first century. The postmodern view says that marriage is whatever government says it is and therefore that government can declare a man a bride and a woman a husband. And if government can do that, why can’t it define a bridge or a dolphin to be a spouse. The postmodern concept “marriage” is defined by arbitrary human invention.

Thus, the postmodern view of marriage takes a top-down, central planning approach. It says that what was once established and accepted over millennia by innumerable and radically different societies and literally trillions of people should now be redefined by a small elite at one moment in time and enforced by the coercive power of the State (I capitalize this word to capture its Germanic quality). According to four justices on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in its 2003 same-sex marriage ruling, Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, “the government creates civil marriage.” Two years later, a federal trial court in Nebraska declared marriage to be a “creature of statute.” As such, the postmodern view of marriage comes in the form of a government dictate. The State now defines what marriage is, which means that the government defines all the rights and responsibilities of marriage, and it is now using its coercive force to uphold its definition of marriage. (I will have more to say on this topic in later essays.)

The result is that marriage is no longer an institution of civil society connected to the metaphysical needs and realities of human life and recognized by government; it is now an institution created by government. And if the State has the authority to create marriage, it shall also have the power to define and create families. Why should families be defined by a mother and father? If government can define what marriage is disconnected from reality, it can certainly define what a family is disconnected from reality. This is the very definition of statism.

The postmodern marriage movement is not and has never been a grassroots movement in the same way that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was or the current homeschool revolution is today. Instead, the postmodern marriage movement is more akin to a top-down ideological putsch promoted by powerful elites in the universities, media, Hollywood, and the courts. It is, we might say, a movement of the 1 percent for the 3 percent. The metaphysical view, by contrast, says that marriage is a naturally and spontaneously evolved social institution that grew from the bottom up in every society known to man. The constituent truth and moral reality of marriage would exist whether it was recognized in the law or not.

In a free society, the law should not create marriage; it should only recognize and sanction it based on metaphysical reality and necessity.

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Conclusion

Metaphysical marriage and postmodern “marriage” are not just different things. They are fundamentally different things. One is naturally grounded in the factual (i.e., biological) requirements of human life; the other is grounded in subjective feelings and desires. One defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman; the other says that marriage is entirely open as to number, sex, gender, species, and duration. One has essential attributes (e.g., monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence) and therefore a fixed definition; the other has open-ended attributes and a fluid definition. One protects the rights of children; the other serves the whims of adults. One serves an objective purpose; the other serves subjective purposes. One is recognized by government; the other is created by government fiat. One derives its autonomy from the natural order and voluntary association; the other derives its authority from the coercive power of the State. One protects the rights of individuals; the other violates individual rights. One requires no government force to be experienced and lived out; the other requires the initiation of physical force to be experienced and lived out. One is logically consistent; the other is logically incoherent.

Given the massive difference between metaphysical and postmodern marriage, the fact that both call for “love” and “commitment” means very little. But why should love and commitment be requirements of postmodern marriage. That metaphysical and postmodern marriage share a few superficial similarities (sometimes) does not change the fact that they are essentially different. They are not the same thing. They are different in kind. And precisely because they are fundamentally different, we need different concepts and definitions to denote and define them.

Ultimately, the postmodern view of marriage is built on two logical errors. The first disconnects the concept marriage from the biological reality on which it necessarily depends. The idea of same-sex marriage, for instance, is based not on perceptual reality and truth but on whim and wish. It has nothing to do with the objective purposes and characteristics of marriage; it has nothing to do with the human problem that marriage seeks to solve; and it has nothing to do with the solution marriage provides for the universal human problem. This is not to say that same-sex, polygamous, and polyamorous relationships are not something real; nor is it to say that they can’t or shouldn’t receive some kind of legal recognition. It is only to say they are not and cannot, by definition, be marriages. They are something else. That they are something else does not diminish what they are (i.e., romantic relationships), it just identifies them correctly.

Second, to expand the definition of marriage disconnected from its metaphysical roots and mixed with various emotional states is to disconnect it from its purpose, function, and characteristics. The proponents of the postmodern marriage must ultimately say that marriage is a relationship between people. It wouldn’t even have to be a romantic relationship. The sex difference, the number, the exclusivity, and the permanence are now all optional or open-ended. Marriage can be between a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, and innumerable other permutations; marriage can be based on limited-term contracts, and it can be open to multiple sexual partners. Same-sex, polygamous, polyamorous, incestuous, and inter-species “marriages” have now been classified as, and made equal to, traditional marriages. And yes, why shouldn’t a woman’s dignity and self-worth be recognized and celebrated if she wants to marry a dolphin!

It is critically important, however, that we distinguish marriage from companionship. They are different things that deserve different names and definitions. The postmodern view of marriage is a conceptual farrago that is in the process of diluting and destroying a special and vitally important institution. It claims to support and democratize a venerable institution while it ignores and denies the metaphysical foundations on which true marriage is grounded. But there is no good reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

In a free society, men and women will have the freedom to associate with whomever they choose, and they will have the right to form private contracts that define the rights and responsibilities of their particular associations. That’s what a free and just society would do.

Audio Recording: I’m not sure what happened to the nice English gentlemen who usually reads my essays. Instead, we have a very clear and direct American woman reading the essay, and she does a fine job!

Have a great day!

*I hope to be back next week with another essay for my series on marriage. The next proposed essay will be titled “Postmodern Marriage.”

THE GOOD

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO?!?! Scientists Discover Sperm Seem To Bypass a Fundamental Law of Physics.

THIS IS UTTERLY FASCINATING, Fatherhood Dramatically Rewires Your Brain, Scans Reveal, AND IT ALSO CONFIRMS SOMETHING I WROTE IN MY ESSAY—”SOMETHING HAPPENED”—FROM A FEW MONTHS AGO:

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND UP:

• Scientists Reverse Alzheimer’s Disease in Mice With Impressive New Treatment.

• Groundbreaking New Compound Could Treat the World’s Deadliest Infectious Disease.

• Amazon Scorpion Venom Shows Promise as Next-Generation Breast Cancer Drug.

• Eli Lilly says weight-loss pill a candidate for speedy approval under new US program.

• The “Freshman 15” Isn’t a Myth: Scientists Reveal Why It’s So Common.

I CAN’T SPEAK FOR OTHER PEOPLE, BUT I PREFER SMALL CITIES TO LARGE ONES: The rise of the small city: Population growth in the U.S. has moved beyond urban cores

PETER BERKOWITZ: U.S. Declaration of Independence on anniversary: Challenges and principles

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND UP:

• 7,000-Year-Old DNA Rewrites the Story of the “Neolithic Revolution.”

• Ancient Bible breakthrough: Hidden pages of St. Paul’s letters revealed after centuries

• A Man Was Walking Through a Field—and Found a Massive Viking Gold Hoard.

• Man’s everyday dog walk uncovers ‘incredible’ relic dating back millennia

WELL, WELL, WELL: Former BLM activist goes scorched earth on ‘scam’ group, insists systemic racism in US isn’t real.

SWEET: In a Groundbreaking First, Scientists Found a Way to Unlock Your Long-Lost Childhood Memories.

PROGRESS—Canadian Style? Alberta will vote in the fall on whether to start legal process for separating from Canada. “The proposed question would ask: ‘Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?’”

MORE FREEDOM IS A GOOD THING:

• Texas Poised To Lead New Natural Gas Pipeline Boom

• Tennessee Leaders Join Campaign To Ban State Property Tax

BEST NEWS I’VE HEARD ALL DAY: Scott Pelley Claims Bari Weiss Is ‘Murdering’ News Program ’60 Minutes’

GOOD ON HER: Adventurer becomes first British woman to cross the Atlantic by hydrogen balloon.

LAISSEZ-FAIRE IS WHAT WE WANT: The thing Anthropic’s repugnant and overbearing “safety controls” on their new model demonstrates, conclusively I think, is that if we allow one or two companies to control all AI research and development, we will also be giving those companies veto power over what thoughts we are allowed to think, what information we are allowed to know, what conversations we are allowed to have. The only solution to this is an open, fiercely competitive market where customers can freely choose to leave when a company behaves like this.

• FOR THOSE WITHOUT X: X-cancel.

EUROPEANS TRAVELING AROUND AMERICA IS JUST WHAT AMERICA NEEDED: Europeans in the US for the World Cup Are Celebrating American Culture—Specifically, Red America’s Culture. I couldn’t help but notice that all these Europeans driving around being charmed by the U.S. are celebrating the very things that Leftists have the most contempt for.

AGREED: Elon Musk is a Genius — and a Litmus Test.

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THE BAD

NEPO BABIES OF THE WORLD UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your million dollar pacifiers: Hasan Piker Calls Musk a ’F***ing Failure as Leftist Meltdown Over SpaceX IPO Intensifies.

SOCIALISM IS BAD IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. There is nothing noble or laudable about the forced redistribution of wealth: Make of this what you will.

THE FOLLOWING IS AN IRON LAW OF POLITICAL PHYSICS: WHERE THERE IS A WELFARE STATE THERE WILL BE FRAUD:

• New Study Warns Obamacare Enrollment Fraud Could Cost Taxpayers Billions In 2026

THE WELFARE STATE IS IMMORAL AND SHOULD BE ABOLISHED: US Government Overpaid Welfare And Medicare Recipients By $186 Billion Last Year

WHERE THERE IS A WELFARE STATE, THERE WILL BE FRAUD. It’s a political law of nature:

• Virginia Wrote Off $300M In Unemployment Overpayments, Only Recovered $6M

• Nevada Congressional Candidates Call For Fraud Enforcement, Healthcare Aid

• I’m Ohio’s state auditor — Medicaid fraud is not just a Washington problem. Audits found payments to dead people, prison inmates and residents enrolled in multiple states.

IT’S AS THOUGH THE FEDERAL AND STATE GOVERNMENTS EXIST SOLELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF BEING RAIDED AND RANSACKED. The welfare state will destroy America: SBA Head Says Agency Found $200B In Fraudulent Pandemic Loans

THERE IS ALMOST ALWAYS A PHILOSOPHY BEHIND THESE MASS SHOOTINGS THAT CAN BE SUMMED UP IN ONE WORD: NIHILISM: What the San Diego Mosque Shooters Believed.

ONE WORD . . . WHY? 2 scientists charged with bringing deactivated mpox virus into the US and lying to authorities.

NOT GOOD: ‘Unprecedented Threat:’ Routine Maintenance Found an IED at an Alabama Dam.

I’M STARTING TO GET A BAD FEELING ABOUT HOW THINGS ARE GOING IN THE UNITED STATES. And it’s mostly the things most people don’t see: America stopped building ships. Now it can’t build a navy

CHINA WATCH:

• China-Linked Group’s Socialist ‘Liberation Centers’ Expanding Across The Country

• Satellite Photos Reveal China’s ‘Active Defense Web’ for Nuclear War.

• Unruly teenagers: Small Pacific nation facing the cost after cutting ‘deal’ with Beijing

• ‘Trump’s Donroe Doctrine’: China tries tightening its grip on the Panama Canal

DECLINE AND FALL—ENGLISH SYLE

• Freeborn No More? The Crime and Policing Bill and the Slow Death of English Liberty.

GREAT BRITAIN IS DYING. That it is committing civilizational suicide is self-evidently true. The British ruling class (both Laborites and conservatives) is the most corrupt in the western world (well, except that of Canada, of course). The Henry Nowak story is a symbol of everything that is wrong with western “Progressivism.” Nowak was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa with an eight-inch, ceremonial, Sikh knife. When the police arrived, Digwa falsely accused Nowak of “racism.” Naturally, the police believed Digwa and then arrested and handcuffed Nowak. He bled out and died shortly thereafter.

• Henry Nowak Killing Highlights Two-Tier Standard on Identity, Policing, and Justice in Britain.

• The merciless mistreatment of Henry Nowak.

• How America’s Racial Politics Poisoned Britain.

• Henry Nowak Case: Police Admit DEI Training Shaped Disgraceful Decision to Handcuff Dying Teen.

• Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit.

• The Martyrdom of Henry Nowak. And the parallels with St George of Fentanyl.

• What Killed Henry Nowak: One Murderer and All the Malignancy of Collective Self-Hate.

TO PLAY THE “RACE CARD” IS YOUR “GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD.” That seems clear now:

“TAKE THE KNEE” IS NOT MEANT TO BE A SYMBOLIC GESTURE OF SUPPORT. It represents the ideological terms of our surrender.

YOU CAN’T HATE ENGLAND ENOUGH: “I Was Sacked From Police for Questioning Islam.”

HYPOCRITE! Ford flew to Phoenix on a private jet: Harrison Ford urges ASU graduates to prevent ‘mass extinction’ by fighting climate change.

I’M PRETTY SURE THAT’S THE WRONG QUESTION: Who Surrendered Feminism?

I BLAME FEMINISM AND AI. How ‘bout you? US Faces ‘Existential Crisis’ As Fertility Rate Continues To Decline

IS CHINA FUNDING LEFT-WING PROTESTS IN THE UNITED STATES? Inquiring minds want to know: ‘Just stunning’: Kevin O’Leary sounds alarm as he ‘uncovered something far bigger than I ever expected’

OH, OK: Dems call lack of menstrual leave ‘economic violence’ in push for new federal law

PERFORMATIVE IN THE SERVICE OF LEFT-WING IDEOLOGY: MS NOW Host Feels ‘Deep Unease’ About America’s 250th Celebrations, Cites Our ‘Racist Past’.

DISMANTLING THE DEEP STATE: Social Security Administration Fires 7,100 Staffers In Historic Cuts

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THE UGLY

IDEOLOGICALLY/PSYCHOLOGICALLY DRIVEN MURDER AND IT ALMOST ALWAYS STARTS IN THE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS: Trans Killer Reveals How Gender Surgery Pushed Her To Execute Parents

PRETTY SURE THIS PEDO IS NOT GOING TO ENJOY HIS TIME IN PRISON: I Love Being A Pedo’: Detroit Doctor Pleads Guilty In Child Porn Case

CRIMINAL PUNISHMENTS IN THIS COUNTRY ARE FAR TOO LIBERAL: Man Gets 33 Years For Sexually Exploiting Over 140 Children

WHAT DO WE SAY OF A NATION WHOSE INTELLECTUAL ELITE SUPPORTS THE DRUGGING AND MUTILATION OF CHILDREN? Detransitioner Outlines Policies To Prevent The Medical Transition Of Minors

. . . and THE BEAUTIFUL

Mozart’s Lacrimosa from the Requiem in D minor is surely one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed. The music represents Mozart’s deepest reflection on, and expression of, grief. If grief is love with no place to go, the Lacrimosa, which translates literally as “tearful” or “weeping,” captures it beautifully.

Have a great week!

I’m deeply saddened—indeed, gutted—to learn about the tragic death of my dissertation advisor, Gordon S. Wood. Professor Wood was America’s greatest living scholar of the America’s revolutionary-founding period and quite possibly the greatest of all time. Even though he was 92, he was still as intellectually active as he was when I met first him 40 years ago. (I will link to a few of his interviews and lectures below.)

When I arrived at Brown University in 1986 to do my Ph.D., I was there for one reason only: to study with Professor Wood. He was already a giant in field. I wanted to study with the best, and he was the best.

Professor Wood’s first and most famous book was The Creation of the American Republic (1969), which revolutionized the study of the American founding. Creation forever changed the way historians and political theorists thought about the founding period. His second book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), was a stunningly original interpretation of the revolution and the ways in which it revolutionized American society. Many wonderful books followed, including a thoroughly charming biography of Benjamin Franklin (The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin), a massive reinterpretation of the politics of the 1790s (Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815), and an extraordinarily elegant dual biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson). And there were many other books.

I could say many things about my personal relationship with Professor Wood, but I shall limit myself to just two stories.

The first involves the writing of my dissertation. Shortly after I’d taken my Ph.D. General Exams, Professor Wood invited me to the Faculty Club to have lunch with him. At a certain point, he said to me: “Thompson, I know you’re not happy here. My advice is to move to Boston, write your dissertation, and send it to me when it’s done.”

That’s exactly what I did. Initially, I was not particularly happy with Professor Wood’s advice. It sure seemed as though I had been abandoned. By contrast, he typically worked relatively closely with most of his other graduate students, reading their dissertations chapter by chapter as they were being written and commenting on them.

During my time in Boston (Somerville to be exact), I worked in the bowels of Widener library at Harvard day and night for two years. During those two years, I never spoke to Professor Wood, not even once. When the dissertation was finished, I (snail) mailed him 600 pages, not a word of which he read until he received the rather large package in the post. Several weeks later, the phone in my flat rang. When I answered, the voice at the other end said, “Brad, it’s Gordon Wood. I’ve just read the first 200 pages of your dissertation and it’s brilliant! You don’t need to change anything!”

When we hung up, I was overjoyed, but I was also overwhelmed with a sense of guilt. What I knew but he didn’t was that the last quarter of the dissertation was a critique of him! He never called back to talk about the rest of the dissertation. That was probably for the best.

But here’s the point: by sending me to Boston, he did the very best thing that he ever could have done for me. He liberated me from his massive influence. Only later did I realize (and then he subsequently told me) that he banished me to Boston because he knew I didn’t need him to write my dissertation. He knew that I could do it on my own. Most importantly, what he really did was to set me free. During those two years in Boston, I developed a kind of intellectual independence that was—and has been—vitally important to my intellectual development. For better or worse, that dissertation was 100% me.

The second thing Professor Wood did for me was to share a piece of advice that I’ve never forgotten. He told me to “think big,” which is precisely what he did in his books. He advised me to write on grand topics—the topics that have scores if not hundreds of books written on them already (e.g., the American Revolution)—but to try and see and say things no one else has seen or said before. In both Creation and Radicalism, Professor Wood completely reconceptualized the way scholars saw and thought about the revolutionary-founding period.

Specifically, he advised me to not engage with other scholars in my books, at least not in the body of text. If you engage with other scholars that means, he said, that you’re letting them set the terms of debate, and, more importantly, it means that you don’t really have anything interesting or original to say. The key is to live with the primary sources and to search for new meaning in them.

He told me once that the key to being a great historian or political theorist was to look for and see the things that other scholars don’t see—to see the unseen. When I think about the meaning and importance of Professor Wood’s books, I’m reminded of what a European diplomat once said of John Adams: “He saw large subjects largely.”

In addition to the senseless tragedy of his untimely death, I’m particularly saddened by the fact that I will never get to have that “last talk” with him in which I was going to ask him all the questions that I’d been storing up for decades.

The truth is, he was supposed to come to Clemson on July 24 to participate in our John Adams Fellows Program. This new program is for graduate students from around the United States who work on the American founding. The plan was for me to have a semi-public conversation with him to be witnessed by a new generation of scholars about to launch their careers. Here a few of the questions I was going to ask him:

• If you could write another book, what would you write on?

• If you were to write a book on a topic other than early American history, what might you work on?

• What are the great unexplored topics in early American history that you would advise graduate students today to work on?

• What do you think is your greatest contribution to scholarship on the American revolutionary-founding period?

• What are the best books on the American revolution and the American founding other than your own?

• How is your work on the American founding similar to and different from the scholarship of political theorists (particularly the students of Leo Strauss) who work on the founding?

• Who were the greatest historians of the American Revolution prior to World War II?

• Which historians would you recommend as models of graceful writing?

• Which scholars have most influenced your work?

• What are the qualities and attributes that make a great historian?

• What advice would you give to graduate students who might want to carry on your legacy?

Unfortunately, I’ll never get to ask these questions, and we’ll never know his answers to them.

Gordon S. Wood was a gentleman and a scholar of the highest order. We will never see the likes of him again.

May his memory be a blessing for all of us. R.I.P.

This essay is the most important in my series on marriage. It states mostly clearly what I think marriage is and why it’s the most important institution ever invented by man. The audio version of this talk is at the bottom of the page, which I’m making free to all subscribers (paid and unpaid) in the hope that you will share this essay with friends, colleagues, and family.

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“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”— George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)

Marriage has existed, as we all know, in every society known to man. Its core principles developed spontaneously around the world over millennia free of State control. We also know that its forms and formalities (e.g., wedding ceremonies) have differed from one culture and religion to another, and all have changed over time. The accoutrements of marriage in sixteenth-century Persia were different from those of eighteenth-century Paris and both are different from marriage in twenty-first century Las Vegas.

In times past (and in some places around the world today), marriage was dictated by wealth, status, dynastic considerations, parental fiat, and patriarchy. The major world religions (e.g., Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism) all have their own marriage rites and traditions. Even within Christendom, the marriage rites and rituals of Catholics and Protestants differ dramatically, and within Protestantism they differ among Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans, and every other denomination. Marriage is a sacrament for Catholics, a covenant for Calvinists, and something else for Mormons. And yet, certain basic principles and characteristics remain fixed from place to place over time.

Why is that? Why should the core purposes and functions transcend time and place? The answers to these questions are more important in the twenty-first century than in any other time in world history.

What marriage Is

The first section of this essay peels away the secondary attributes of marriage in order to reveal its essential core. Understanding and defining what marriage is, is the heart of the matter. Rationally understood, marriage is a complex social institution—part moral vow, part legal contract, part political license, part cultural norm—that creates and defines a particular kind of moral-legal relationship between a man and a woman. Marriage takes two unique individuals and creates something new—a married couple—that is now to be treated by the law as a single unit. It formalizes, consummates, integrates, solemnizes, objectifies, and perpetuates the biological necessities and the romantic union of a man and a woman through a public declaration sanctioned by law that this couple shall be henceforth and forever treated as one. Marriage, the most private and intimate of all personal actions, is a public act.

As a concept, marriage has specific referents in reality (i.e., its constituent parts include men and women who become grooms and brides and then husbands and wives to each other), a proximate cause (i.e., the desire to consummate romantic love spiritually and physically), specific characteristics (e.g., monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence), and a central purpose (i.e., the potential bearing and rearing of children who become sons or daughters to their mother and father). The unity of these elements, causes, characteristics, and purposes defines what marriage is.

Put in Aristotelian terms, marriage has a material cause, an efficient cause, a final cause, and a formal cause. Its material cause—the material from which it is made—is one man and one woman; its efficient cause—the motivation and action that put it in motion—is sexual attraction and romantic love; its final cause—the purpose or function for which it exists—is the bearing, rearing, and protection of children as a family; and its formal cause—the form by which it actualizes its purpose—is monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence.

Epistemologically, the concept marriage refers to a certain kind of relationship defined by certain kinds of actions between the institution’s existential referents (i.e., husbands and wives) and their connection to a larger community. The relationship that is marriage and the unique actions that go with it, are, always have been, and must be gender specific and gender connected. The concept marriage necessitates certain ostensive referents that are metaphysically absolute. A marital union without husbands and wives is more than a contradiction in terms; it is disconnected from metaphysical reality; nay, it represents the disintegration (i.e., the destruction) of the concept.

Furthermore, the epistemological meaning of marriage is inseparable from its purpose. This is easily demonstrated. That marriage is directed to one objective end is demonstrated by an irrefutable counterfactual or reverse inference: there is no state in the American union, nor is there any nation in the world that permits biological brothers and sisters (or mothers and sons or fathers and daughters) to marry. And with good reason. Biological siblings typically carry common recessive genes, and any incestuous sexual reproduction often leads to children with serious congenital defects and disorders. The institution of marriage is designed to encourage health families and healthy individuals.

What’s more, imbedded in the concepts “husband” or “wife” are innumerable seen and unseen cultural mores and moral norms that guide the complex and particular functions and actions that define marriage. The specific and unique actions between a married man and a woman are component parts of a special kind of relationship that is distinguished from all other relationships within the broader community in which they live. Moreover, the concept marriage distinguishes this kind of particular relationship from all other male-female relationships. One important purpose of wearing a wedding ring is, for instance, to send a signal to all people outside this particular marriage that the parties are taken and not participants in the romantic or sexual market. To arbitrarily change the definition of marriage and disconnect it from its metaphysical and epistemological foundation would be to introduce conceptual and therefore moral, social, and political anarchy into an institution that encompasses what is probably the most important social-legal relationship known to man.

Let’s turn now to the actions that add up to and define the relationship known as “marriage.”

First, marriage marries. It is a coming together and a kind of reconciliation that unites in one two very different kinds of people, the two great halves of humanity (i.e., a man and a woman with their profound physical and psychological differences), each of whom seeks lasting fulfillment and joy in a life lived together. Epistemologically, marriage encapsulates and defines a specific relationship. Legally, marriage recognizes a new unit out consisting of dissimilar entities. It reconciles biologically distinct and sexually asymmetrical adults, who nonetheless share a sexual complementarity that has the potential to create new human life sharing the DNA of both parents. The primary purpose of marriage brings new life into society and then connects that new life legally with its biological mother and father.

Second, marriage is created by the voluntary actions of a man and a woman in a public ceremony—a wedding, which has various rites and rituals that serve an important social function. It is a rite of passage marking the transition from one moral-social-legal condition to another. Marriage is initiated by a vow—a declaration witnessed by the public and recognized by the government. This vow is part personal, part public. A man and woman promise to each other and declare to their community that they shall be true to each other and forsake all others forever and that they shall care for each other in sickness and in health. (Why do they do this? Why should anyone care?)

Third, the primary actions that define relational parts of marriage are gender specific. Marriage transforms men and women into husbands and wives and then into fathers and mothers. It defines the rights and responsibilities of husbands and wives toward each other and of mothers and fathers toward their children; and it sends cultural signals to the rest of society defining the relationship between married and unmarried men and women.

And finally, the underlying assumption of marriage is that husbands and wives will raise all children born to them. The vow of marriage therefore has a kind of (non-religious) sacred responsibility attached to it. It is much more than a private contract or a negotiated deal of cohabitation. Arguably, it is the most important decision an individual will ever make.

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Marriage Stakeholders

To better understand the full complexity and meaning of marriage, it must also be seen from the perspectives of its four natural stakeholders: 1) the men and women who seek to marry; 2) the children born to a married couple; 3) the community of relatives, friends, and neighbors in which the married couple lives; and 4) the government whose job it is to protect the rights of married couples and any children they might have.

From the perspective of individual men and women, the moral relationship that is marriage begins with a choice—the selfish, moral choice of a man and a woman to protect and perpetuate their romantic relationship as a husband and a wife in the context of civil society. Men and women choose a future spouse from innumerable potential options. They do so for entirely selfish reasons. Person “A” chooses person “B” instead of persons “X,” “Y,” or “Z” because of the pleasures, satisfaction, and joy that “A” receives from “B.” Marriage as a duty is an entirely immoral concept. Marriage is first and foremost a volitional moral bond between a man and a woman, who create for themselves a whole new private universe motivated and held together by their mutually assured love. This means, first, that the self-interest of the husband and the self-interest of the wife have largely, though not entirely, merged as one. Marriage should never involve sacrifice. If one’s spouse is one’s highest value, then giving up all lower values is not and cannot be a sacrifice. It means that both husband and wife elevate the other to a privileged place in his or her life such that each is self-interestedly concerned with the happiness and wellbeing of the other. Legally, men and women seek marriage to protect their rights as a single unit. Marriage is a rights-protecting institution.

Another important angle from which to view marriage is from the all-too-forgotten perspective of children. It bears asking: what do children need and want, and to what do they have a right? In other words, what is owed to children in the context of marriage?

Children have a strong rights-based claim to be raised by their biological parents. This claim is based on one crucial fact: children come into the world as helpless beings dependent entirely on adults to survive. The responsibility to satisfy this right redounds morally to the child’s natural mother and father, who in turn have a self-interested stake in the well-being of their biological child. We also know that children have a powerful desire to be raised by the two people who gave them life and brought them into the world. Virtually all children have a genuine longing to experience the different forms of love and affection expressed by a biological mother and father. Marriage provides the institutional structure by which adult society protects the rights and interests of children, and it protects the natural bond between parents and their children from outside interference.

Marriage is also a social institution. Its vows are witnessed and sanctioned by the community—by our relatives, friends, and neighbors. For better or worse, all societies everywhere have shown a real interest in the institution of marriage, and most people share an interest in the success of other people’s marriage. It is in our self-interest that marriages succeed. Social chaos typically comes with cultures that don’t respect marriage. Social science literature for over fifty years has clearly and unequivocally demonstrates that the break-up of the two-parent family in the United States is the direct and principal cause of crime and social chaos in many American communities.

A decent, civil society begins with marriage and the family. The social function of marriage is to provide an objective structure in which the sometimes-volatile intellectual-emotional-physical union of men and women can find order, stability, and protection. From the perspective of society, marriage encourages men and women to unite sexually in a responsible way so that the community may create a future for itself. Marriage also creates new relationships and actions between the married couple and the community in which they live. It ends the “next of kin” legal connection between an adult son/daughter and his or her parents, and it establishes each married partner as the other’s legal next of kin; it establishes rights and responsibilities relative to joint property, executorship, and the custody and care of children; and it announces to the world that any child born to a married woman is presumed to have been fathered by her husband, who now must assume certain responsibilities. As a social institution, marriage creates millions upon millions of small, private, self-interested, rights-bearing platoons that are protected by the fortress of the law.

Finally, the role of government in marriage is limited but important. The first thing to note is that government should be in the rights-protecting and not in the love-promoting business. Love is and should be invisibilis to government. A rights-protecting government should care not one whit about love. Government’s only proper purpose is to protect individual rights, and that’s its sole function in marriage. From the government’s perspective, the institution of marriage is a rights-enhancing, rights-protecting institution, which means that government has a legitimate role in protecting the individual rights of the various parties involved in marriage. Marriage properly recognizes a constellation of rights that are meant to 1) insure that both parties fulfill their chosen marital obligations; 2) protect married couples and their children from outside interference; and 3) protect children from abuse, neglect, and abandonment. The government’s attitude toward marriage should be one of laissez faire or salutary neglect. (I shall have more to say on this specific topic in a forthcoming essay.)

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Why Marriage?

Morally, socially, and institutionally, marriage captures a core human truth that distinguishes it from all other human relationships. It is rooted in the sexual difference, complementarity, and asymmetry of men and women and in the experience that all societies have with reconciling the complex but necessary sexual relations between men and women. Marriage universally was, is, and will forever be society’s macro-solution to the problem of human generation and survival. (While it is true that the socio-legal institution of marriage was and is organized for ordered reproduction as a central, organizing purpose, procreation is not a necessary pre-condition of any particular marriage. Infertile couples and those who choose not to have children are in fact married. Still, we must never forget that marriage was, is, and must be rooted metaphysically, epistemologically, morally, sociologically, and culturally on a model of partnership that is nonetheless connected to human procreation. But for that fact, the difference between marriage and all other kinds of partnerships would be one of degree only rather than one of kind.)

Anthropologists and the ancient philosophers tell us that marriage developed historically as a natural, pre-political form of association. Aristotle, for instance, suggests in the Nicomachean Ethics that the “friendship between a husband and a wife seems to be in accord with nature.” Moreover, marriage is “earlier and more necessary than a city.” Put somewhat differently, procreation is an objective, metaphysical necessity of human survival. The fundamental question is, how will this necessity be promoted and achieved by men and women in a social context?

As a natural, pre-political institution, marriage arose in response to certain observably immutable facts of reality: 1) that men and women are sexually attracted to one another; 2) that sex between men and women sometimes creates new human beings; 3) that only women carry and bear children; and 4) that children are entirely dependent on adults for their survival and for their physical, intellectual, and moral maturation. These are necessary, absolute, and observable facts of reality—facts that are true about human nature regardless of what anyone feels, wants, prays, or chooses—facts that ground marriage in the requirements of human life.

Anthropologically, we know these immutable facts of human nature led to a series of persistent and pervasive social problems in all societies. Imagine a world before the rise of marriage, a world in which men and women engaged in indiscriminate (and often forced) sexual relations that often resulted in pregnancy and the bearing of children. In such a state, the central problem was this: men and women have sexual relations but only women get pregnant and bear children. This is what we mean by the sexual asymmetry between men and women. Women are biologically connected to children, and every time a child is born a mother is always present. These natural and sociological facts are, however, confronted by one massive counterfactual: fathers are not always present when children are born and raised. In other words, there is no similar biological necessity, however, connecting fathers to childbirth, and hence to babies and their mothers.

Every culture known to man has understood that a society of husbandless mothers and fatherless children is a formula for disaster. For instance, if men did not know that the child born to the woman with whom they’d had sexual relations was theirs, they would typically either abandon mother and child to fend for themselves or they would engage in potentially deadly competition with other men to claim their paternal rights and authority. Neither outcome was salutary for the immediate parties involved, nor for the larger community. Moreover, when men engaged in promiscuous sexual relations and impregnated more than one woman (as some were—and are—want to do), their economic resources were either centralized in one family and thereby impoverishing the others, or the resources were dispersed and diluted among several families. It also led to polygamous sexual relations, wherein dominant males would monopolize multiple women and leave male outcasts sexless and childless. Eventually, the sexual aristocracy would face an upheaval from the sexually impoverished, who would revolt and fight for their right to procreate. In other words, a society defined by non-marital, non-monogamous sexual relations often led to social disruption, anarchy, and barbarism.

These basic facts of human nature also lead inexorably to certain sociological facts: 1) that the well-being of mothers and their children is promoted by the presence of fathers; and 2) that raising children in stable family units promotes the interests of children and the perpetuation and wellbeing of society. The discovery, development, and institutionalization of marriage in all places around the world was therefore a response to the challenges and requirements of human life. Marriage attaches husbands to wives and fathers to their biological children in order to protect mothers and their children and to provide stability in society at large.

Marriage was and is therefore the universal solution to a series of ineradicable human problems. It was developed and institutionalized by freely associating individuals to 1) enable women to avoid becoming husbandless mothers of fatherless children; 2) tame and channel sexual jealousy; 3) pool, manage, and protect limited economic resources; 4) transfer property from one generation to another; and, 5) establish a safe and stable environment for men and women to create families and to raise and educate their children free of outside interference.

In promising monogamy, married couples make a commitment to each other (and to their community) that they would only have children with and through each other. The exclusivity of marriage insured that men would know who their biological children are to eliminate competing paternity claims and the social conflict that goes with them. The permanence of marriage protected the vulnerability of women during pregnancy and during the years in which they are rearing dependent children. As a social institution, exclusivity and permanence ensured that children were raised by their natural parents throughout their minority.

In sum, marriage is the institution that creates, orders, and protects family life primarily for the benefit of children. Without this primary purpose or final cause guiding what marriage is, two of its fundamental characteristics (i.e., exclusivity and permanence) would not be necessary (or at least they would be optional) and they might not even be desirable. In fact, if humans reproduced asexually, or if newborns and young children were somehow not dependent on adults for their survival, marriage would be an unnecessary institution, at least from the perspective of society and government.

Every civilization known to man has understood the need to recognize that human reproduction and its claims are an irreducible feature of the human experience. This is how and why I say that marriage is grounded in the metaphysical reality. Put slightly differently, marriage is the moral-socio-legal institution that recognizes and supports the metaphysical necessities of human life. It acknowledges and secures the relation between a child and a particular set of parents. It is the foundational pro-life institution that every society has recognized to secure a future for itself. No decent or free society has ever treated the question of who may properly call a child his or her own as optional or as a matter to be decided by government fiat. Unless a particular civilization has an explicit death-wish (e.g., the Jim Jones “Jonestown” commune in Guyana), every society known to man has recognized that its future is dependent on its ability to successfully organize a healthy marriage culture.

Marriage as a Socio-Moral Institution

As a socio-moral institution, marriage is different from all other human relationships. It is naturally ordered to procreation and to the rearing of children, and, as such, it is a natural extension of biological reality. Put differently, it attaches men and women to each other in a permanent legal bond and then to their children. That’s what the institution of marriage does; that’s what its forms and formalities do. Moreover, virtually every human society has discovered and instituted marriage as the most salutary and orderly way to create a future for itself. It is a life-serving institution. It is the only form of human association rooted in the self-preservation of the species. Were it not for this fact, marriage would be just another form of partnership or friendship. Marriage provides a moral and legal structure that serves as the primary building block for creating stable families, and thus it is the means by which society not only perpetuates itself but builds a truly civil society. Marital unions reflect and identify a basic and necessary truth about human life, providing an objective good to society in ways that other kinds of relationships could not. Marriage is, therefore, the necessary and foundational building block of any civil society.

Indeed, a strong marriage culture is a sine qua non of a free and decent society. Civilized societies depend on parents educating their children to become rational, self-governing, rights-respecting, virtuous, productive citizens, which in turn requires mothers and fathers to commit their lives to each other and to the education of their children. Marriage makes this possible. Parenting is a long, costly, difficult, and delicate process of ongoing care and supervision that requires a deep and abiding commitment of both parents. Biological mothers and fathers working as a team do this better than anyone. We all benefit—including free-riding unmarried individuals—from those who create, support, and educate children to sustain our civilization. Most people know incompetent and rotten parents, but we have not invented a better way to raise children. The alternatives (e.g., the government raising children) are considerably worse.

The argument for marriage may be summed up with this simple syllogism: Procreation is a necessary precondition for the existence and survival of human life; marriage is fundamental to responsible procreation and parenting; therefore, the existence and wellbeing of a civil society is dependent on marriage. Historically and cross-culturally, marriage is and has been the solution to one of mankind’s most vexing problems. It is therefore good not because it is traditional; it is traditional precisely because it is good. Marriage is good because it is true and serves human life.

This audio recording of “Metaphysical Marriage” is available to all subscribers of The Redneck Intellectual.

Have a great week!

THE GOOD

I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO RECOMMEND THE NEW SUBSTACK JUST LAUNCHED BY MY GOOD FRIEND, ROGER KIMBALL. Roger is one of the best thinkers and writers of our time. Agree or disagree with some of his views, Rogers essays are always top-shelf:

LET’S GO! A researcher may have found a shortcut to Mars as NASA eyes red planet. Here’s what to know about the newly found possible shorter trajectory to Mars, and what it could mean ahead of future missions to Earth’s planetary neighbor.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY CAPITALISM:

IN MY EXPERIENCE, THIS IS TRUE, BUT THERE IS, OF COURSE, A THIRD OPTION THAT PROMISES EVEN GREATER HAPPINESS: Why are conservatives so much happier (and less neurotic) than liberals?

MUST READ. Good essay on a bad topic: Don’t Lose Your Nerve: Free Societies Facing Ideological Violence.

• Related: The Destructive Impulse of Liberalism: Where is ‘progress’ leading? And other questions you should never ask.

• Related: The bougie nihilism that is killing America

BECAUSE MODERN LIBERALISM IS GROUNDED IN HATE AND PERPETUAL HATRED IS PSYCHOLOGICALLY UNSUSTAINABLE: Why are conservatives so much happier (and less neurotic) than liberals?

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND UP

• ‘Weight loss’ drug helps heart regardless of amount of weight lost.

• ‘Earth-shattering’ discovery reveals why some 80-year-olds have superior memories

• Living tumor-on-a-chip exposes how cancers block immune attacks.

• New research from the University of Auckland’s Liggins Institute suggests that a capsule containing healthy gut bacteria could potentially change the future of obesity treatment.

• New research uncovers how the brain’s activity, energy use, and blood flow change as people fall asleep.

I’M NOT CONVINCED THAT IT’S TIME TO CELEBRATE, BUT WE’RE ON THE RIGHT ROAD: How the left ‘lost’ the DEI wars

• Related: Staffers at UNT, UT-Arlington ‘no longer employed’ after undercover videos detail DEI practices despite ban.

THE HARVEY C. MANSFIELD EDITION. Two new books this year at age 94. Looks to me like his career is about to take off:

• Harvard’s ‘Annoying Socratic Gadfly’ Takes a Victory Lap

• Harvey C. Mansfield’s honorable quest to educate Harvard

YOU CAN’T RESPECT MELEI ENOUGH! When Argentine President Javier Milei met with Pope Leo XIV, he gave him a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s 1988 book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. Let’s hope the Pope did his homework.

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND UP:

• Under the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Archeologists Found What Could Be the Tomb of Jesus.

• Archeologist thinks new tech could reveal where the Lost Ark is hidden at last.

• Archaeologists crack ‘Spanish Roanoke’ mystery with haunting find from doomed colony

• Archaeologists Found 115,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Where They Shouldn’t Be.

• Bronze and Iron Age Settlement Discovery in Georgia Rewrites Ancient History.

LEFT-WING CORRUPTION IS BOTTOMLESS: ‘MASSIVE!’ Feds indict SPLC for using donor money to pay white supremacists to stage ‘hate crimes’

POWER UP: Appalachia Lithium Cache Could Power U.S. for Centuries

THIS IS GOING TO GET INTERESTING:

• Alberta separatists say they have enough signatures to trigger independence referendum

• Oil-rich province could hold vote on leaving Canada as early as October

SCIENCE ROUND UP:

• The Genesis revitalizing U.S. scientific research

• 24,000-year-old zombie worm gets thawed, immediately starts reproducing.

• An Unknown State of Matter Could Be Hiding in Our Solar System.

• Physicists just found a tiny flaw in time itself.

• A tiny world beyond Neptune has an atmosphere that shouldn’t exist.

I DON’T THINK THIS IS QUITE RIGHT, BUT IT’S AN INTERESTING ENCAPSULATION OF A THEORY OF CIVILIZATIONAL DECLINE AND FALL. What do you think? Please leave a comment below.

I SURE HOPE SO: Is America on the Verge of a Nuclear Renaissance?

CLEANING UP THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH: Good gut bacteria may be the secret to longevity — how to get it, including the strain that boosts your natural GLP-1.

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THE BAD

THIS IS NOT A SOMALI THING; IT’S A WELFARE THING: DOJ says it has prosecuted $500 million in healthcare, COVID fraud claims in 3 states

STEP #1: STOP REPRODUCING. Step #2: Make up for Step #1 by inviting your enemies to do just the opposite. Step #3: die slowly: US Birthrate Hits Record Low In 2025

WHAT CAN’T GO ON FOREVER, WON’T: Queer advocacy group pauses $500 yoga allowances for immigrants in Boston

ALAS, I STRONGLY SUSPECT THIS IS TRUE: The scourge of left-wing violence isn’t new. It’s only going to get worse.

NO: Can Our Civilization Survive Its Betrayal By Elites?

CHINA WATCH:

• Mayor admits she secretly pushed Chinese propaganda at Beijing’s command: feds

CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERTARIANS NEED TO REDISCOVER THE IMMORALITY OF THE WELFARE STATE: Medicaid Millionaires: How The Feds Pay Immigrants Billions To Hang Out With Their Families

WHAT CAN’T GO ONE FOREVER, WON’T: U.S. deficit projected to hit $2 trillion, double fiscal target.

END THE WELFARE STATE: Ohio gov candidate Vivek Ramaswamy sounds alarm about Medicaid fraud — after 288 companies found registered to same address.

THE UGLY

I’M SPEECHLESS! This is worst piece of news that I’ve seen in years: 600 groups with $2B in revenue mobilize 3,000 May Day protests in a ‘red-blue’ alliance

WHAT DO YOU THINK WOULD BE THE APPROPRIATE RECKONING? There Must Be a Reckoning for Gender Transitioners Who Destroyed the Lives of Thousands of Children.

VERY SAD: I De-transitioned. My Body Will Never Be the Same.

NEXT LEVEL EVIL: Redefined evil’: New report reveals ‘almost unimaginable horrors’ by Hamas during Oct. 7 war against Israel

. . . and THE BEAUTIFUL

DON’T YOU JUST LOVE AMERICA! Route 163 Through Monument Valley in Arizona. I’ve done this drive. It’s fabulous. Highly recommended.

HAVE A GREAT WEEK!!!

**The audio recording of this essay is at the bottom and is reserved for paid subscribers.

“Married love between man and woman is bigger than oaths, guarded by right of nature.”—Aeschylus, The Furies (458 BC)

Marriage was once a topic of serious contemplation and conversation in the history of moral and political philosophy because it was thought to be the central social institution of civilization. Virtually all the ancient Greek and Roman moralists thought marriage an important topic to think and write about and early modern moral philosophers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau likewise thought it a subject worthy of serious consideration. In fact, most philosophers examined marriage as a topic of serious philosophic investigation up through the end of nineteenth century.

By the twentieth century, however, marriage died an ignominious death as a subject worthy of serious philosophical contemplation, which may help to explain why it has suffered a mortal wound as a lived experience. Once wedding vows were reduced to the ritualized incantation of mere words and the institution of marriage relegated to the world of pop psychology, its standing as a topic of serious philosophic consideration was relegated to an afterthought. Eventually, by the post-WWII era, avant-garde “intellectuals” began to treat marriage as a quaint, non-essential relic of late-bourgeois society, and, at worst, as an authoritarian institution that oppressed women, children, and various sexual minorities.

The time has come to reconsider marriage as a topic of profound importance and consequence. Even though it is the most timeless and universal social institution known to man, its philosophic meaning has suffered from one very real problem: it was assumed that that which is virtually self-evident to all men and women everywhere, through all time, needs no explication or defense. This is the tragic flaw of marriage as a social institution: in a postmodern age that seeks to deconstruct and tear down virtually all moral, social, political, and economic institutions in order to rediscover what Marx called man’s “species-being,” an institution, the meaning of which formerly went without saying, was bound to be deconstructed sooner or later.

Fast forward to today.

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How to Think About Marriage

Ironically, the rise of the same-sex marriage movement in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century has spurred a renewed interest in both the theory and practice of marriage. In fact, a new front in America’s ongoing culture wars was opened around the marriage issue in the decade before the Windsor and Obergefell decisions, pitting the nation’s two dominant sectarian forces—religious conservatives and secular liberals—against one another in pitched battle.

Religious conservatives argue that marriage is commanded and ordered by God (see Genesis 1:27-28, 2:24). This view can be summed up in two words: “God said.” God’s law defines and guides the institution of marriage (e.g., “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder,” Matthew 19:4-6). The Christian ideal says that marriage is fixed and unchanging: it is the monogamous, exclusive, permanent union of a man and a woman whose one-flesh union mirrors in some way the nature of God himself. For traditionalists, the forms and formalities of marriage are intrinsic to God’s will. For proponents of this view, the very idea of same-sex relationships, never mind a same-sex marriage, is an abomination.

Secular liberals, by contrast, argue for a latitudinarian view of marriage, one that decouples marriage from any religious foundation. This “liberationist” or postmodern view of marriage rejects the traditional forms and formalities of marriage as representing an outdated, unenlightened, oppressive view of human flourishing. For secular liberals, marriage is inherently subjectivist in nature. It is grounded in feelings, wishes, and whims. Postmodern marriage is an inherently genderless institution based on the emotional needs of adults as they seek spiritual and sexual autonomy. And it too can be summed up in two words: “I want.” The liberationist view defines marriage simply as the companionship of two or more people based on a strong emotional commitment. Some postmodernists view traditional marriage, at least traditional heterosexual marriage, as something to destroy.

In my view, both sides of the marriage debate—the “God said” versus the “I want” positions—are mistaken. Marriage is neither intrinsic to God’s will, nor is it grounded in the subjective will of men. Both views are fundamentally disconnected from reality.

Methodologically, my approach is not based on religious claims or postmodern ideology, nor does it appeal to authority or whim. The traditional definition of marriage does come closer—much closer—to the truth of what marriage is relative to the postmodern view, but it does so for insufficient if not mistaken reasons. By contrast, my approach examines how and why marriage serves the requirements of human life. By elucidating and contrasting the metaphysical and postmodern views, I hope to transcend the superficial claims that have characterized the marriage debate of the last quarter century. Much hinges on the outcome of this national conversation, and so we must strive to get it right.

My purpose in this essay is to establish an approach to marriage that is objectively and demonstrably true (i.e., based on the requirements of human life), life-enhancing, and consistent with the moral and political principles of a free society. A view of marriage that is true (i.e., objective, certain, absolute, permanent, and universal) must be based on facts and data that have been available for all to see for millennia (i.e., the material of history, cultural artifacts, personal introspection, the observation of human nature, and vicarious experience).

In the essays to follow in this series, I present a rational view of marriage that is grounded in the facts of reality and that can be validated objectively and logically. I call it the metaphysical view of marriage. (I shall examine the metaphysical view of marriage in the next essay.) This secular, fact-based, rational approach begins by examining human nature and it does so by asking one simple question: why marriage?

By keeping this question center stage, we can see how and why a proper view of marriage is grounded in the immutable facts of reality. As a metaphysically grounded institution, marriage fulfills certain requirements of human life, which is why it would exist whether men were religious or not. Marriage is some thing (i.e., a certain kind of relationship) that is real and specific: it has a cause, a nature, a function, and a purpose that are grounded in the objective reality of human nature. Subsequent essays will contrast the metaphysical view of marriage with the postmodern view.

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The Curious Nature of Marriage

Before we go too far down the wedding aisle, it might be helpful to remind ourselves that what is often called “traditional” marriage is a curious, perplexing, and possibly even a bizarre institution.

Think about it this way: most men and women at a relatively young age will (often within a stone’s throw of puberty), amid countless members of the opposite sex from whom to choose, make a public vow to one person that they shall spend the rest of their lives together, loving and caring for each other exclusively. Two very different kinds of beings—the two great halves of humanity—are now united in a monogamous, sexually exclusive, and permanent relationship that is often fraught with mystery, uncertainty, adventure, joy, disappointment, longing, heartbreak, tedium, and peril.

How strange is that? Why limit yourself to just one person at such a young age? Why commit yourself forever? What’s the sense in that? And getting married is the easy part! It is the staying married part that’s hard.

The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume actually thought marriage was an inherently “dangerous” enterprise, which is maybe why he never tied the knot. Consider what marriage does. “Nothing,” noted Hume, “is more dangerous than to unite two persons so closely in all their interests and concerns, as man and wife, without rendering the union entire and total. The least possibility of a separate interest must be the source of endless quarrels and suspicions. The wife, not secure of her establishment, will still be driving some separate end or project; and the husband’s selfishness, being accompanied with more power, may be still more dangerous.” Or, as House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, once put it, “Why would you get married? Why would anybody get married?”

Pelosi’s question is not unreasonable, particularly given the divorce rate in the United States today, which stands at approximately forty-five percent. J. Paul Getty, one of America’s great twentieth-century industrialists and a man who was married five times, captured some of the mystery and irony that is marriage when he said, “I would gladly give all of my millions for just one lasting marital success.” Getty’s lament points to both the enduring desirability and difficulty of marriage, thus raising the question: is marriage rational?

Consider the moral meaning of that precise moment when a marriage is created. The publicly uttered wedding vows of a groom to his bride (reciprocated by the bride to her groom) typically go something like this:

“I, _Name_, take you, _N_, / to be my wife, / to have and to hold / from this day forward; / for better, for worse, / for richer, for poorer, / in sickness and in health, / to love and to cherish, / till death us do part.

With these forty-one words, the lives of two people change radically and forever. The decision of a man and a woman to marry is a life-altering moment in the lives of two different people, a choice that requires a good deal of wisdom about oneself and the other person—a very rare kind of wisdom, indeed.

But the fact that a man and a woman love each other above all others when they are 25 does not guarantee that they can or will love each other when they are 35, 55, or 75. Love is a complex thing. To be in love, which is to receive something, is not the same thing as to love, which is to give something. Marriage is a delicate balance between receiving and giving over a long period of time.

The practical challenge of marriage, however, is that individual men and women change over time; they change physically, psychologically, and emotionally, all of which means their needs and expectations change. Over the course of even just five or ten years, a wife may gain excessive weight and several chins, or a husband may go bald and develop a beer belly. One spouse becomes less attractive to the other or both to each other. With the inevitable physical changes that men and women experience will sometimes come psychological and emotional changes. One spouse may lose self-confidence whilst the other gains in self-confidence, and with those changes one partner becomes more or less interested in sexual relations with their spouse. Physical attraction changes over time. Rarely does it become stronger.

Often the material and spiritual values between married couples change as well, not to mention their moral, social, and political principles. What happens to a married couple where the husband becomes a radical vegan, and the wife becomes a devotee of the so-called “paleo” diet? What happens to a married couple when the husband wants to spend more and more money on cars and vacations and the wife wants to give more and more money to African charities? What happens when couples learn that they don’t share the same moral, social, and political values on topics such as welfare, abortion, drugs, sex, and pronouns? What happens if the wife is a Republican and the husband a Democrat? What if one becomes an atheist and the other is a devout Christian? What if one spouse supports transgenderism and the other doesn’t? And then, of course, there are the micro and macro differences that husbands and wives experience and face every day as they raise children.

If most people can’t know with certainty who or what they will become in the future, how can they expect to know who or what another human being will become 20 years in the future? And even if the particular individuals did not change one iota, the fact remains that relationships can and do change because our knowledge of the other person can never be absolute and because the relationship itself changes the people in it.

The romance and mystery with which marriage typically begins almost always ends in a very different place. At the beginning of marriage, husbands and wives may be described in their relationship to each other as “strangers in a strange land.” New love is a foreign place, and its mystery is exciting and dangerous. With time, however, marriage for many couples becomes familiar, dull, commonplace, and then, for all too many, it ends with crushing boredom and bitter resentment.

The biting sarcasm of H. L. Menken is not too far off the mark in describing the unromantic nature of many marriages. Speaking of husbands and wives in marriage, Mencken captured the enervating inertia of marriage: “By and by all the mystery of the relation is gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother and sister. Thus that ‘maximum of temptation’ of which Shaw speaks has within itself the seeds of its own decay. A husband begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He ends by making Machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the every day sharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a proceeding about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal for words.”

And of course, Mencken no doubt understood that the dismal art of marriage cuts two ways, not just one. I shudder to think what sharp-tongued female wits might say about their husbands. The Machiavellian lengths to which many women will go to avoid intimacy with their husbands is one of the principal causes of divorce. At the end of marriage, husbands and wives may once again be described in their relationship to each other as “strangers in a strange land” but for reasons entirely different than when they began their marriage.

On top of all the changes that define marriage, very few people get married in a vacuum. When a man marries a woman, he will almost always marry into her family. Brides typically come with mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters as well as an extended family of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces, and vice versa. Most grooms in addition to becoming husbands also become a son-in-law and a brother-in-law. Most people who marry, marry into an extended and complex web of family relations, each with its own history, challenges, and problems. Each one of these relationships has the potential to affect the relationship of husband and wife. Not a few marriages have crashed on the rocky shoals of in-laws.

With time, husbands and wives also typically become mothers and fathers to a child or several children, and then, together, they become seen as parents to the outside world. Babies change everything. What was knowable or predictable in the relationship between husbands and wives now becomes unknowable and unpredictable in their relationship as parents. Children often bring to the surface the sometimes differing values and principles of their parents that were left submerged or hidden before the birth of a child. Parents are required to rear and educate their children on everything from table manners and fashion to friendship and sexual morality. To expect husbands and wives to agree on virtually all the choices and actions they must take on behalf of their children is to expect what never was nor ever will be.

For better or worse, marriage is usually a package deal of multifaceted, multi-layered relationships, and these relationships can change who we are. Change, complexity, and confusion are therefore endemic to marriage. Some marriages get better over time, and some get worse. Tragically, then, many people experience marriage as a form of cruel and unusual punishment and, in the worst cases, as an emotional death sentence. Nietzsche tells us with some apparent truth “There is bitterness in the cup of even the best love.”

That men and women would commit themselves to marriage is therefore quite a remarkable thing. Human beings are fallible and they are not omniscient, and yet they make a decision that will affect them in the most comprehensive and profound ways for the rest of their lives. It turns out that forever—till death us do part—is a really long time. In today’s world, a marriage may last a good fifty, sixty, or even seventy years.

Living with the same person under the same roof day after day for years and then for decades almost always leads to marriages—including the very best—that experience periods of frustration, indifference, disillusionment, anger, pain, and resentment. Most marriages go through trials and tribulations that would wreck most other relationships. Friendships do not end in murder-suicides, for instance, but, tragically, some marriages do. Add children to the mix and the challenges of marriage are compounded in untold ways. It is an inherently fragile institution that has the potential to hurt and wound not only the married couple but also any children it may produce when it all goes wrong. The same is usually not true for friendships. This is why marriage is ultimately about more than just two people, and this is why we all have a vested interest in the nature and meaning of marriage as an institution.

In the light of all this, marriage is simultaneously the most curious—or bizarre—of all human institutions, and yet it is the most important, the most needed, the most beautiful, and possibly even the most natural of all human institutions.

So, let us go forward by asking two basic questions: What is marriage, and why do men and women need it?

Have a great day!

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***You can expect another marriage essay in one week.

DUMB & DUMBER (NO. 133)

K-12 EDITION

BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT YOUR CHILDREN ANYMORE AND EDUCATION ISN’T THE GOAL: Instead Of Reading And Math, Teachers Are Grading Kids On Personality And Emotions

THE MIND CONTROLLERS ARE LOSING THEIR GRIP ON REALITY: Will Johnny ever learn to read? Pushback against science of reading mandates

TITLE CORRECTION: GOVERNMENT SCHOOL TEST SCORES CONTINUE TO DECLINE OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST 50 YEARS: Public School Test Scores Continue To Decline Since Pandemic

ETERNAL VIGILANCE: Reasons to keep an eye on the activists in schools.

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES (e.g., bridges falling, planes dropping out of the sky, etc.): Woke Mathematics in Education- Part 1. While the last few years have witnessed growing “fatigue” regarding woke and DEI policies, they are still prominent fixtures in our society, especially (and unfortunately) in our STEM fields.

DEMOGRAPHY IS DESTINY: THE COLLAPSE IS COMING FASTER THAN YOU THINK, AND IT’S ALL SELF-INFLICTED:

UH-OH: Leaked docs put nation’s largest teachers’ union in hot seat from top watchdog

HIGHER ED EDITION

AN ARRESTING TITLE BUT ON TARGET: Defund The Education Institutions Churning Out Left-Wing Assassins

CAUSE: San Francisco Reinstates 8th-Grade Algebra After ‘Equity’ Experiment Fails. EFFECT: Colleges drop remedial math, students drop math courses.

WHAT CAN’T GO ON FOREVER, WON’T: Americans waking up to reality around college.

NOW IS THE TIME TO INVEST IN BLUE BOOKS BECAUSE THE BLUE BOOK EXAM IS BACK: AI Will Destroy Universities

WORST FINANCIAL DECISION OF MY LIFE WAS TO NOT HAVE INVESTED IN THE COMPANIES THAT MAKE BLUE BOOKS: Colleges Bring Back Blue-Book Tests To Fight AI Cheating, But There’s A Hitch

NO! Next Question: Can Universities Be Reformed?

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES: ANALYSIS: ‘Death to America’ chants echo across campuses due to Iranian influence and radical professors.

MORE FREE ADVERTISING FOR HOMESCHOOLING: SICK, EVIL MONSTERS’: Principal who celebrated Charlie Kirk assassination gets busted for child porn, now learns fate

PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION EDITION

BUT NOT MUCH ELSE: Nursing schools finally can cure the DEI disease

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DUMB & DUMBER (NO. 134)

K-12 EDITION

THAT BAD PEOPLE WANT TO HURT OUR CHILDREN IS NOT SURPRISING. What is surprising is that the government schools are ok with it: ‘Gaining steam’: Terror ‘front group’ accused of strong-arming U.S. schools into promoting Islam

THERE WILL BE LAWSUITS—PROMISE: NY School District Secretly Promoted Medical Gender Transitions For 8th Graders

TOTALLY NORMAL: FIRED! Kindergarten teacher terrified kids with his fetish persona as a wolf

GOOD NEWS, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Zero is the number we’re looking for: The Education Department Is Shrinking

WHY IS IT ALMOST ALWAYS FEMALE TEACHERS? Former Teacher Of The Year Finalist Gets 14 Years For Sexually Exploiting A Student

UMM . . . PRETTY SURE THE ANSWER IS THE METHOD BY WHICH CHILDREN ARE TAUGHT HOW NOT TO READ VIA THE “WHOLE WORD” APPROACH TAUGHT IN THE SO-CALLED “ED” SCHOOLS: Why Johnny Can’t Read.

HIGHER ED EDITION

YOU’D THINK A FEW PROFESSORS AT PENN MIGHT DO THAT, BUT NO . . . : Pennsylvania lawmaker calls for mandated course for students on ‘dangers and realities’ of Marxism.

AND THE ARGUMENT IN DEFENSE OF THE PROFESSOR WOULD BE . . . WHAT? Please enlighten us. What do you think? Is College Making People Stupider?

CORNELL IS IN BIG TROUBLE: Biologist accuses Cornell of ‘egregious’ discrimination against white men in lawsuit.

SAYING THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD. This has been the goal of the Left for the last 75 years+: Villanova U. Prof Says Academia Should be Used as a ‘Trojan Horse’ for Socialism

ANALYSIS TRUE: Intersectionality is an “intellectual foundation for violence, terrorism, antisemitism, and anti-westernism”

PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION EDITION

IF SOCIALISM ALWAYS FAILS, THEN WHY DOES IT NEVER DIE? Law Schools Are Training Next Generation Of Immigration Activists

*Have a great week.

And if you’re looking for something to read . . .

My newest book (and there is a second volume to go with it) . . .

My best book . . .

My first book . . .

My most controversial book . . .

My most personal book . . .

***This is the first essay in a series on the nature, purposes, meaning, and consequences of marriage. I can think of no topic more important than that of marriage. The series will last as long as I’ve said what I need to say.

I have no doubt that both religious conservatives and secular Progressives will find things to dislike throughout the series. That’s ok. Please feel free to leave comments in support of or against my claims. If you disagree, prove me wrong and make a better argument. I’m open to persuasion.

This first essay is merely introductory, while succeeding essays will drill down more deeply into the marriage question.

The audio recording of this essay is available at the bottom.

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“It is a good thing when a man and woman choose to live together as husband and wife. It is a joy to their friends, a warning to their enemies, but only they know the true meaning of it.”—Homer, The Odyssey

The Western world is experiencing an unprecedented change in how it views the nature and meaning of marriage. Fewer people today are getting married, and almost forty-five percent of those who do end their marriage in divorce. More importantly, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 5-4 in its 2013 landmark decision, U.S. v. Windsor, that certain provisions of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act were unconstitutional, thereby opening the door to nationalizing same-sex marriage (SSM), which of course is precisely what happened two years later in the Supreme Court’s Obergefell vs. Hodges decision.

The Court’s 5-4 decision in Obergefell ruled that the 14^th Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses require all states to license marriages between two people of the same sex and to recognize same-sex marriages lawfully performed in other states. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion held that the fundamental right to marry is inherent in individual liberty and applies equally to same-sex couples, as there is no fundamental difference between same-sex and opposite-sex unions with respect to the principles of love and companionship. In a nanosecond, an almost 5,000-year-old, legally-recognized institution was changed radically.

The Windsor and Obergefell decisions represent a major event in the life of the nation not dissimilar to the 1857 Dred Scott decision. (I am not suggesting that these two very different institutions are the same morally.) Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in that infamous case expanded the meaning of property to include slaves, thereby laying the groundwork for the nationalization of slavery. Similarly, Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell expanded the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions, thereby nationalizing same-sex marriage. In both cases, the majority opinions were subject to powerful dissents, which in turn reflected the views of a divided public. All parties to the Windsor and Obergefell cases recognize that the court’s two-pronged decision goes to the heart of our society’s most fundamental values and principles.

Regardless of what the Supreme Court says or what the cultural consensus is at any given moment, serious philosophic questions about monumental questions never go away. And few questions are more important than the question of marriage. In fact, I’m not sure that I can think of a more fundamental and consequential moral question. Consider, for instance, one of the critical functions served by a wedding, which is to encourage those in attendance and witnessing the union to reflect upon the nature, meaning, and beauty of marriage.

Still, as a culture, a nation, and even as a civilization, I do not think that we reflect often or deeply enough about the nature and meaning of marriage. Certainly the older I get and the longer married I am, the more I feel drawn to think about marriage. It took a long time (maybe longer than it should have), but I think I’m only just now beginning to see the monumental importance of marriage not just for my life but for civilization.

How, then, should we view marriage in the twenty-first century? Have we transcended the traditional and outdated understanding of marriage and reached some bold new and higher meaning of marriage?

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The New World of Marriage

For several thousand years of human history, the idea of same-sex marriage had less reality than the idea of unicorns. It was simply beyond the pale of what wise men and women in every culture considered in accord with the nature and purposes of marriage. In the blink of an eye, all that changed. A moral and cultural Tsunami—one that is sweeping aside customary social norms and legal precedents that have existed for millennia—is now washing over America with breathtaking speed.

Both sides of the marriage issue understand that altering the institution of marriage will have profound consequences for the kind of society we live in. This Brave New World will affect the kinds of relationships we have as adults, and it will certainly affect how we understand the nature of the family and the raising of children. To discuss the nature of marriage is therefore to discuss the nature of the family, which in turn is to discuss the nature of society.

To fully appreciate the intellectual, psychological, cultural, and political revolution that has taken place in the last quarter century, let’s consider some basic historical and sociological facts. Up through the late 1990s, only a handful of obscure intellectuals were even talking about same-sex marriage. Even by the early 2000s, the idea of same-sex marriage was incomprehensible for most Americans. As late as 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both publicly opposed same-sex marriage. Today, that view is equated with Jim Crow segregation.

Even more remarkably, this massive cultural upheaval has taken place with virtually no serious public discussion, no serious intellectual engagement, and no serious thought about the profound effects it will have on our individual and cultural self-understanding. How do we account for this enormous sea change in public opinion over the course of the last twenty years or so?

This much is certain: the proponents of same-sex marriage were enormously successful in raising vast sums of money to advance their cause culturally and politically, methodically relentless in their grassroots organization and marketing, tireless in pushing their message through the print and electronic media, Hollywood and the music industry, and utterly ruthless in propagandizing the universities and America’s schools K-12. In short, we’ve witnessed nothing less than an intellectual blitzkrieg, a program of cultural “Shock and Awe” over the course of the last two decades that has left many dazed and confused.

And so, what seemed unthinkable within the memory of most adults is now a legal and cultural fact. Ask a typical college student today if he or she supports same-sex marriage and the answer is an incredulous “well, of course.” It is a complete non-issue for many of today’s young people. It is not a subject about which they must do any heavy mental lifting. The justice of “marriage equality” is a truth self-evident to Millennials and Gen Z requiring no reasoned defense. In fact, to even question the propriety or wisdom of same-sex marriage is now beyond the pale of civil discourse or social decency. Young people feel no real need to think seriously and deeply about the profound effects that redefining marriage will have for our self-understanding, and they seem disinterested in reflecting upon the far-reaching practical implications that same-sex marriage will have for our society.

We now live in a curious world where otherwise relatively uneducated and thoughtless teenagers and twenty-somethings have reached a new stage of post-Hegelian enlightenment, a state of higher consciousness unavailable to their reactionary and unenlightened parents and teachers, who are now thought to be out of step with the times. Publicly announcing one’s opposition to same-sex marriage on an American college campus today is almost akin to announcing that one is a Christian or an atheist on a street corner in Mecca. Observing the disdainful and hectoring attitudes of our young people today reminds one of the child revolutionaries in Roland Joffé’s 1984 film The Killing Fields, who lecture their much wiser elders in reeducation camps on the historical inevitability of The Revolution.

How did America’s young people, who seem to know so little about anything else, come to have such enlightenment? What is the source of this newfound wisdom? It would seem that the long arc of History has already declared as predestined tomorrow’s winner and losers. Who needs Xenophon, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, or Locke on marriage when you have “Will and Grace” and the “Modern Family” (aka the TV shows) on your side?

America’s rapidly changing demographics on the marriage question do not, however, tell the whole story. More ominously, American society today is now divided between the enlightened few and the unenlightened many. On one side stands reason, morality, freedom, equality, progress, compassion, decency, and love, and on the other side stands nothing but the forces of superstitious irrationalism, reactionary stupidity, Troglodytish bigotry, and segregationist oppression. To support the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is now seen by many as illiberal, which means bad. It is the Forces of Light set against the Forces of Darkness. This Manichean world is now divided into binary categories of Us and Them, Friends and Enemies, Saints and Sinners, Believers and Infidels, all of which can be reduced to “The Good” and “The Evil.” The unwashed masses that stand for traditional marriage are said to suffer from a new kind of mental illness: homophobia.

Not surprisingly, many conservatives and libertarians have either waved the white flag of surrender, or they have begun calling for a brokered truce on the marriage issue before any real intellectual engagement has taken place. But a truce was never an option for the proponents of same-sex marriage. Nary a shot was fired in the cultural battle over same-sex marriage before the Nervous Nellies of the Right vacated the intellectual battlefield and began their fast retreat. This would suggest that they quickly realized they had been wrong on the marriage issue, that they are intellectual cowards, or compromising pragmatists.

Thus, it was only a matter of time before Ross Douthat, the lone “conservative” columnist at The New York Times and a supporter of traditional marriage, waved the white flag asking in a whimpering op-ed for “The Terms of Our Surrender.” Douthat conceded unconditional defeat on the marriage issue and expressed his hope that the conquering forces would treat him and his friends humanely.

Make no mistake about it: this is a cultural revolution the likes of which has never been seen before.

Still, for the tens of millions of unenlightened Americans stuck in the here-and-now, the question of marriage is a living and not a settled issue. It is not going away anytime soon. In fact, we may very well be witnessing the beginning and not the end of the marriage debate. Thoughtful Americans on both sides of the issue are right to wonder about the true meaning and long-term consequences of redefining marriage politically. The form in which this conversation takes place will be a test of who we are as a nation.

We do well, then, to recall Abraham Lincoln’s prescient words as he contemplated the impending crisis haunting the United States in the late 1850s: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending,” he said, “we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.” These are wise words for our present discontents. It is imperative that we understand “where we are, and whither we are tending” on the marriage question. Thoughtful Americans will no doubt disagree with one another on this controversial topic, which is why we must demand nothing less than a rational, serious, frank, and high-minded conversation. While it is still permissible to think and talk about the nature and meaning of marriage and family, let us do so in the spirit of genuine philosophic investigation.

To that end, I plan to offer a (longish) series of essays on three general topics: 1) the nature and meaning of marriage; 2) the role played by marriage in society; and, 3) the relationship between marriage and government in a free society. I will publish several essays under each of these broad topics.

The first general area examines two competing theories of marriage: what I call the metaphysical and the postmodern. These essays ask the following questions. What is the origin, purpose, and structure of marriage? Is it grounded in objective reality, or is it an infinitely flexible social construction? If it is grounded in objective reality, what are the facts that give rise to it? If it is a social construction, can its purposes and characteristics be remade at will?

The second general area examines the two best arguments for same-sex marriage: first, that homosexuals deserve the same right to marry as do heterosexuals; and second, that same-sex marriages will not diminish opposite-sex marriages.

The third general area examined in this series investigates the relationship between marriage and government in a free society. More particularly, I shall ask two questions: first, what is the proper role of government in marriage, and second, will laws supporting same-sex marriage expand or contract government and the sphere of freedom in America?

In the end, all of us should examine, philosophically, the nature and meaning of marriage and its relationship to the principles and practices of a free society. We must examine the presuppositions of the metaphysical and postmodern views of marriage and then explore the practical implications and consequences of both views. The manner in which we define marriage will have real consequences for how we think about the structure and wellbeing of families, how we think about the nature and meaning of motherhood and fatherhood, and, most importantly, it will affect how we think about the rearing and education of children. Surely these are topics worthy of the deepest philosophic consideration.

Ultimately, the way we view marriage will profoundly affect how we view the kind of society we are and want to be. In many ways, the marriage question, philosophically understood, cuts to the core of the human condition. To ask what marriage is, or should be, is one of the most important and fundamental human questions. It speaks to who and what we are as humans.

The time has come for Americans to renew their interest in the marriage question. As we go forward, let us pursue the truth about marriage in the spirit of rigorous and honest analysis.

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