Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Week 24: In Defense of Traditional Marriage (Part II)


In Defense of Traditional Marriage (Part II)
Why the tradition of marriage is dead, and how we can bring it back to life. (continued from last week)

In the battle over California Proposition 8, nostalgia won.

Nostalgia, masquerading as tradition, fooled us all into believing that the ritual and form of white weddings and heterosexual love were timeless and universal truths. 

But dig deeper, and we find that weddings are not always white, the participants not always so pure (or heterosexual, for that matter), and that the love binding two individuals together is so universal a truth that no grammatical modifier can or should ever be used to limit its meaning: There is no gay love or straight love. There is just love, love.

Love awakens us to our common humanity, enabling us to work together and achieve more collectively than we ever could as individuals. Without love, we become destructively independent, and communities fall apart.

Love forms the bedrock of our society, and marriage—at its core—is about love.

It is love that allows two biologically distinct entities to create a single life together: to learn together, grow together, and then to pass on their values, culture, and experiences to the next generation. This description—stripped of all superficial ritual and form—is the true tradition of marriage.

Does same-sex marriage really break with this tradition? What meaning is there in the love between a man and a woman, that is absent in the love between two men, or two women?

Some would argue that marriage isn't about love; that it's about having procreative sex that produces biological heirs to their worldly fortunes. Marriage, they argue, is about sex.

But how can this be right?

Sex is base. It is animal. To define marriage based on sex is more in line with modern day Satanism (which encourages one to indulge the pleasures of the flesh) than with Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any other major 'system' of belief.

If marriage is about producing children (i.e. making babies), then that means sex is paramount to the union, and love need not be involved.

But if marriage is instead about rearing children (i.e. raising responsible adults who don't get angry at the world for their own failures and then channel that rage into senseless acts of violence that cripple the community), then really, love is paramount, and sex is irrelevant.

So which is it? Which is more important: producing biological heirs to inherit all our worldly fortunes, or producing spiritual heirs to inherit all our cultural wealth?

Love or sex? Which is paramount?

I think the answer is obvious: Marriage—this sacred institution—must be about love.

Marriage has always been about love. The tradition of marriage is the tradition of love, and to deny same-sex couples the right to marry because they can’t procreate is to redefine marriage as it has existed for generations. It is to cross over from tradition and into nostalgia.

Today in California, as a result of Prop 8, the phrase “Defending Traditional Marriage” is a misnomer. There is nothing left to defend.

The tradition of marriage is dead. The people who voted to defend their “traditional” definition of marriage were fooled, and Californians have been split into two well entrenched, self-destructively independent groups of thought as a result.

We have abandoned love in favor of ceremony, sown mistrust into our communities, and allowed blind faith to make a mockery of our Constitution.

Marriage has no meaning now to a true traditionalist—a true conservative. It will have meaning again only when we stop worshiping the ritual and form of marriage, and allow it to evolve with time and place.

It will have meaning again when we recognize that there is a difference between love and lust, and that when we practice abstinence we never learn to distinguish between the two.

It will have meaning again only when we remove all traces of nostalgia from our timeless founding documents, abandon the restrictions we have placed on love, and embrace the true tradition of marriage once more.

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