The objections are such as should make everyone in our world uncomfortable, both those who call themselves conservative and are busy destroying the heritage of western civilization, and those who call themselves liberal and are busy curtailing and denying every freedom but that of the zipper.
His first two arguments are; that it would enshrine the sexual revolution in law, even though the consequences have been disastrous. And that it would enshrine in law the principle that sex is a completely private question, society be hanged:
It is hard for us to imagine, in a world of mass entertainment and its consequent homogenization of peoples, how central an event the marriage is in every culture. It marks the most joyful celebration of a people, who see their own renewal in the vows made by the young man and the young woman. For although marriage focuses upon the couple (and it is interesting to remember that even our word focus is a marriage word, denoting in Latin the hearth), it does so because the couple embody a rejuvenation in which everyone, young and old, male and female, take part.
In his Epithalamion, the English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser summons everyone to the solemn celebration of his wedding -- and after the priest has “knit the knot that ever shall remain,” and the revelers have splashed themselves and the groom’s walls with wine, and the girls have danced and the boys have run shouting up and down the street, and the bonfires have blazed and the hours of celebration have been hastened along in glee, he bids everyone to leave him and his bride alone.
They enjoy each other’s love, and pray that from their “timely seed” they may raise a large posterity. Here we have an understanding of marriage infinitely deeper than the meager thing we are now left with. Of course it is personal and private: and it is public, and universal, even cosmic. It bridges two chasms that must be bridged, lest the culture, that is the cultivation of all that a people most dearly cherish, wither away, and the people separate one from another, into a suspicious world of privacy.
Should be interesting. Curtsy: No Left Turns
