If Marriage Can Mean Anything, It Will Soon Mean Nothing
BY: STELLA MORABITO | NOVEMBER 29, 2022
Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/29/if-marriage-can-mean-anything-it-will-soon-mean-nothing/
STELLA MORABITO
VISIT ON TWITTER@STELLA_MORABITO
No matter how you define “marriage,” there is zero respect for it in the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. You may believe it serves to federally codify the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision that rejected marriage as a male-female union. Maybe it would do so temporarily. But that’s not the endgame.
If you’re paying attention, you can see that the Senate’s recent 62-37 vote for cloture on HR 8404 puts us one step closer to abolishing state recognition of marriage entirely. That’s where this train is headed.
This will happen the same way such things always happen — through a demonization campaign that frames skeptics as bigots who are guilty of discrimination. That’s how you get Democrat-pliable Republicans such as Mitt Romney and craven Supreme Court justices like Anthony Kennedy to sign on. That’s how you manufacture a public opinion cascade, warning average Americans that they’ll be pummeled with lawsuits and ostracism if they dare think out loud.
And that’s how Democrats in Congress are likely in the not-too-distant future — via HR 8404 — to make the case that marriage actually comes with privileges that discriminate against the unmarried. Disagree? You’re a bigot who deserves to be socially ostracized! Self-censorship in the face of such accusations will pave the way, as always.
Collectivists Hope to Destroy Private Life and Regulate Relationships
Once they’ve gotten to that point via HR 8404 and Republicans who supported the measure, congressional Democrats will doubtless push us to agree that marriage is a discriminatory institution. We’ll start seeing more anti-marriage initiatives supported by singles, millennials, Julias, and gen Z, all well-groomed for the moment by teacher’s unions, academia, and media.
They’ll fall for the pitch that we can all just write up domestic partnership contracts instead. “Marriage” would then become nothing but a legal relationship (a contract) between two (or more) people for any purpose at all. Bureaucrats would broker those contracts. This proposal is all mapped out in Sunstein and Thaler’s 2008 book “Nudge.” It’s also been promoted for decades by internationally acclaimed feminist legal scholar Martha Fineman who writes that a system of contracts replacing marriage will help the state “regulate all social interactions.”
Under a system that abolishes state recognition of marriage, the family could no longer exist autonomously or unmolested by the state. How could it if the state no longer recognizes marriage as the foundation of the family unit? The government would have no requirement to recognize religious rites of marriage as valid. Thus, it would meddle more deeply in religion and religious communities that recognize bonds of kinship through blood ties.
We Become Atomized Individuals in the State’s Eyes
The atomization resulting from this will have repercussions that go beyond the bill’s guarantee to treat any difference of opinion as a federal crime. If we continue on this path, the government will no longer have to recognize any biological relationships. It need not recognize any legal right you might have as the parent of your biological child. Why should it? It would have already abolished its recognition of the union that produced the child.
Some of this process has already been completed through gender-neutral language in documents like passports, birth certificates, or the rules of the 117th Congress that do not recognize the words “mother,” “father,” “son,” or “daughter.”
Much groundwork has also been laid by surrogacy and abortion laws that treat children as chattel to buy, sell, and dispose of at will. And why would the state have to recognize any other relationships resulting from marriage if it no longer recognizes marriage? It could ignore your blood relationships to brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or any familial bond. In this scenario, you’d likely need a license to raise your own child, an old communist goal that the so-called Respect for Marriage Act conjures up.
When all there is are bureaucratized domestic partnership arrangements, the government would no longer need to recognize spousal privilege and thereby could legally coerce spouses to testify against one another in court. It could also abolish the default path of survivorship through which your inheritance goes to your spouse or next of kin. Instead, the state would be free to redistribute your nest egg at will in its great bureaucratic wisdom.
Indeed, there is no reason to doubt that the Respect for Marriage Act serves as a midwife to the radical left’s long-held goal of abolishing state recognition of marriage. It will allow the government to regulate our relationships, rendering each of us naked before its power.
We are each being set up for a pre-arranged marriage with Big Government operating as our abusive spouse.
Such Atomization Is a Totalitarian Necessity
The path to human atomization is the natural arc of all totalitarian systems in the making. They must always first isolate people in order to control them through terror, as Hannah Arendt noted in her work “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Tyrants always mask their intentions by borrowing from tradition, using words like “respect for marriage,” “love,” or “equality” as they march us all into virtual solitary confinement.
There’s nothing new about this trajectory. It’s a long-standing vision of all totalitarian systems, which first came into the open with the Communist Manifesto’s proclamation, “Abolish the family!” Communists referred to traditional religion as “the opiate of the people” while setting up communism as a pseudo-religion that demanded unquestioning loyalty. The resulting dependency then truly becomes the fentanyl of the people.
Such deceptions are why Schumer and company talk about marriage as though the government has some sort of litmus test for “love.” But anyone with half a brain knows that love’s got nothing to do with a functioning state’s interest in marriage. Marriage is an institution that exists to allow for a structured society and for the protection of children.
Of course, we easily forget such facts while living in a nation that increasingly promotes infanticide, assisted suicide, recreational drug use, child pornography, and other ways to torture and kill our children. In fact, virtually all of their policy positions are tailor-made for family breakdown, community breakdown, and for hostility toward religious communities.
But maybe you like feeling lonely and alienated, like the idea of a childless and hopeless future, and are all for the state regulating your personal relationships and conversations. Well, then, you’ll like the “Respect” for Marriage Act.
But the destruction of bonds of affection and loyalty in the private spheres of life makes sense from the point of view of statists. Those loyalties get in the way of their ambitions for power and social engineering. They are invested in isolating us so that we become dependent upon them.
What Did You Say? 
People wait to enter the Supreme Court in Washington, Monday, Oct. 6, 2014, as it begins its new term. The justices cleared the way Monday for an immediate expansion of same-sex marriage by unexpectedly and tersely turning away appeals from … more >
By Steve Deace – – Monday, October 6, 2014
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/6/deace-issue-threatens-unravel-both-constitution-an/#ixzz3FVEZDdLy
With the 35-year marriage between Christians and the Republican Party already on the rocks, a U.S. Supreme Court with a majority of Republican appointees just put the religious liberty of every believer in the GOP base in unprecedented peril.
The GOP was already struggling to maintain the loyalty of its conservative base, and one of its last, best talking points was the importance of judicial appointments. Now that talking point has also been blown to smithereens. The John Roberts court gave us Obamacare, the narrowest wording possible when siding in favor of Hobby Lobby, got rid of the Defense of Marriage Act, and, on Monday, opened the floodgates for an onslaught against the First Amendment.
By deciding not to intervene in the fight it started last year, (in a divisive 5-4 ruling that Justice Antonin Scalia chastised for its “jaw-dropping assertion of judicial supremacy”) the Supremes gave the green-light to a full-blown constitutional crisis, the likes of which threatens to tear the GOP apart at the seams.
There are two reasons — one constitutional and the other political — why this has the potential to be far more explosive than even Roe v. Wade:
Constitutionally speaking, redefining marriage and morality has already proven it will also include redefining free speech, religious liberty, and private property rights as we’ve known them since the dawn of the republic. Already this year, we’re seeing an unprecedented assault on these cherished traditions by the same people who promised us the new “tolerance” wouldn’t cost anybody else their rights. The examples are legion and would require a whole separate column to chronicle. They even include a military court martial for those who believe in marriage as we’ve always known it.
One of the worst examples is what’s happening now to Robert and Cynthia Gifford, a Catholic couple in New York who are facing a $13,000 fine for refusing to rent their own home to lesbians for their “wedding.”
With few exceptions, disagreement on the sanctity of life hasn’t cost someone their livelihood or their home the way disagreement on marriage and morality has already shown it will. That’s because what’s behind this movement isn’t really tolerance, but intolerantly using the coercive force of government to make you abandon your own moral conscience. Just ask the Giffords in New York.
Understand that what’s driving this movement isn’t equality, but validation. The kind of ultimate validation the “new tolerance” cannot get from the God from whom they are sadly estranged. So the “new tolerance” wants validation from the second-most powerful force on earth instead — government.
And if you will not validate them, then you will be made to care.
Politically, this issue could be the final undoing of the Reagan Coalition that transformed electoral landscape a generation ago. Prior to Roe v. Wade, Catholics rarely voted Republican, and evangelicals rarely voted at all. Catholics were mostly Democrats, and evangelicals were waiting to be raptured away. But once baby-killing was sanctioned by the judicial branch, and the other two branches of government rolled over and played dead as well, that mobilized long-at-odds Catholics and evangelicals to come together to form the Moral Majority. That’s what allowed Reagan and the Republicans to have their governing majority.
However, while that culture war resurrected the Republican Party, this one threatens to crucify it. Reagan welcomed the flock into his herd, but the elites in charge of today’s GOP have let it be known they want no part of this battle (or any other, for that matter).
To wit:
One of the key legal advisers to the anti-marriage crowd is President George W. Bush’s former solicitor general. John McCain’s 2008 national campaign manager is working with the ACLU to squash state marriage laws. The last two GOP presidential nominees, Mr. McCain and Mitt Romney, both urged Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to veto legislation that would’ve reaffirmed the First Amendment in her state earlier this year.
Of course, right on cue, a GOP establishment best known for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory jumps on a bandwagon just as it’s losing steam.
As Michael Medved recently noted, the latest figures from Pew Research show the so-called “gay marriage tidal wave” we’ve been told was forthcoming is barely a trickle-down-zeitgeist. Support for redefining marriage has dropped five points this year, and a majority of Americans — including 77 percent of black Protestants and 82 percent of white evangelicals — agreed with the statement “homosexual behavior is a sin.”
White evangelicals, by the way, remain the largest demographic of the GOP base. It’s quite possible John Kerry would’ve been elected president in 2004, without the marriage amendment on the ballot in the key battleground state of Ohio driving up their turnout. In that same election, the Michigan Marriage Amendment got almost 300,000 more votes than George W. Bush did. Proposition 8 defending marriage in California got more statewide votes there in 2008, a huge Democrat year, than any Republican has ever received statewide. Marriage did better than Mitt Romney in all four states they shared the same ballot in 2012. In North Carolina, 61 percent voted for marriage, just four months before the Democrats showed up in Charlotte for their national convention.
Yet here we are, the base that rescued the GOP from its post-Watergate funk, remembering all the times post-Reagan we plugged our noses, ignored the GOP establishment’s foul stench, and pulled the “R” lever on Election Day nonetheless. In our time of great need, how are we repaid?
With scorn, contempt, and abandonment. Just look at this Monday headline from The Daily Caller: “The GOP’s Plan B: Throw Social Conservatives Under the Bus.”
Who knows? Maybe all those illegal aliens the GOP establishment wants to grant amnesty to will happily take our place. And maybe I’d look good in a thong.
Ironically, the issue most Republicans would love to run away from will be a front-and-center vetting tool in the looming 2016 GOP presidential primary, which is slated to start on Nov. 5. The old talking points aren’t going to cut it, either.
We can’t “let the states decide” the issue when the courts won’t allow the states to decide the issue. And we can’t wait to pass a Federal Marriage Amendment while our religious liberty is being threatened right now. Not to mention the courts have already shown a blatant disregard for the Second Amendment and most of the Bill of Rights as it is. So I fail to see why they’d suddenly submit to this new amendment.
Most of the states that are traditionally pivotal in the early GOP primary calendar have passed marriage amendments — South Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, and Florida. My home state of Iowa historically fired three state supreme court justices who thought they could redefine marriage. Thus, everyone is going to be forced to go on the record on this issue, once and for all. And when it comes to protecting our God-given rights, that’s a pass-fail exercise.
The Christian family business owner doesn’t care that the Republican will cut their taxes when they’re too busy paying hefty fines and legal fees just for being a Christian.