Bush speaks out on marriage amendment—too little, too late

If only Bush had campaigned seriously for the Federal Marriage Amendment, instead of, as per his usual modus operandi, going through the absolutely minimal motions required to maintain his credentials with conservatives. He made an announcement months ago supporting the amendment, and, this past Saturday, he argued for the amendment in his weekly radio spot. That’s it. There’s no sign that he’s made any active effort or invested any political capital to persuade the public or to win the votes of Senators and Congressmen on this fundamental issue.

Bush’s disgraceful failure of leadership aside, he said some things in his radio talk that were notable from a traditionalist point of view:

A great deal is at stake in this matter. The union of a man and woman in marriage is the most enduring and important human institution, and the law can teach respect or disrespect for that institution. If our laws teach that marriage is the sacred commitment of a man and a woman, the basis of an orderly society, and the defining promise of a life, that strengthens the institution of marriage. If courts create their own arbitrary definition of marriage as a mere legal contract, and cut marriage off from its cultural, religious and natural roots, then the meaning of marriage is lost, and the institution is weakened. The Massachusetts court, for example, has called marriage “an evolving paradigm.” That sends a message to the next generation that marriage has no enduring meaning, and that ages of moral teaching and human experience have nothing to teach us about this institution.

The trilogy, “cultural, religious, and natural,” is the keystone of all traditionalist understandings. We may speak of it as the “natural, social, and transcendent,” or as the “biological, cultural, and spiritual.” As the French conservative Louis de Bonald wrote in his important book, On Divorce, human beings participate in three societies: the domestic (the family), the public (the state), and the religious (the Church), or, as Eric Voegelin put it in the magisterial opening sentence of his five-volume Order and History, “God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being.” However expressed, the tripartite scheme seems to arise spontaneously from the structure of existence. We exist as human beings within those three dimensions of reality. And the function and aim of liberalism is to dissolve all three of those dimensions of reality by reducing reality to the rights and fulfilments of the individual self, and to the enforced equality of a man-made world that consists of nothing but such individual selves.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 12, 2004 03:23 PM | Send