Homosexual “marriage” as the apocalypse of liberalism

In light of the (long-expected) failure of the federal marriage amendment in the Senate today, let us consider what the institutionalization of same-sex “marriage” really means. As Maggie Gallagher eloquently states in this remarkable passage written at NRO on June 25, it means that the very concept of sexual differentiation—of male and female, husband and wife, fatherhood and motherhood—is to be denied any public recognition in our society:

The transformation of mother and father into “Parent A” and “Parent B” is the model of the paradigm shift now underway in Massachusetts. The distinctive features of the union of male and female are going to have to be removed from our notions of marriage and family. The experience of same-sex couples will become the new norm for family life, because the “unisex” idea that gender has no public significance is the only model that can be construed as “inclusive” of both opposite-sex and same-sex unions. The result is not neutrality but the active promotion of a new unisex ideal, in which the distinctive features of opposite-sex relations will be submerged, marginalized, cast to one side, and redefined as discrimination in order to protect the new court-ordered public moral standard of the equality of same-sex and opposite-sex couples.

In this new paradigm of society as a collection of non-sexually differentiated individuals and the mutual arrangements they make to satisfy their emotional needs, all natural, cultural, and spiritual values that cannot be reduced to the human person, his desires and his rights, will be marginalized. To attain true human equality, society and its institutions must be destroyed. Thus (as I’ve argued previously) the inconceivably radical innovation of homosexual marriage is not an extreme or excessive development of liberalism, but its logical and inevitable terminus, since only such a unisex concept, by equalizing same-sex couples with heterosexual couples, can be truly “non-discriminatory” and “inclusive.” Being the final revelation of liberalism, homosexual marriage with its attendant denial of sexual differentiation can only be decisively turned back when we reject liberalism as the organizing idea of society. In this ultimate conflict, there will be no neutral ground.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 14, 2004 07:28 PM | Send