The Destruction of Marriage
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution.
Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or
women marrying women, it is about the
deconstruction of marriage between men and women.
That is a thing that many men and women of one
generation understand but have trouble conveying to
another generation for whom marriage has already
largely been deconstructed.
The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell
the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading
institution. Family is a flickering light in the
evening of the West.
The deconstruction is destruction. Entire countries
are fading away, their populations being replaced by
emigrants from more traditional lands whose
understanding of the male-female relationship is
positively reactionary. These emigrants may lack
technology or the virtues of civilization, and their
idea of marriage resembles slavery more than any
modern ideal, but it fulfills the minimum purpose of
any group, tribe or country-- it produces its next
generation.
The deconstruction of marriage is not a mere matter
of front page photos of men kissing. It began with
the deconstruction of the family. Gay marriage is
only one small stop on a tour that includes rising
divorce rates, falling childbirth rates and the
abandonment of responsibility by twenty and even
thirty-somethings.
Each step on the tour takes apart the definition and
structure of marriage until there is nothing left.
Gay marriage is not inclusive, it is yet another
attempt at eliminating marriage as a social
institution by deconstructing it until it no longer
exists.
There are two ways to destroy a thing. You can
either run it at while swinging a hammer with both
hands or you can attack its structure until it no
longer means anything.
The left hasn't gone all out by outlawing marriage,
instead it has deconstructed it, taking apart each
of its assumptions, from the economic to the
cooperative to the emotional to the social, until it
no longer means anything at all. Until there is no
way to distinguish marriage from a temporary liaison
between members of uncertain sexes for reasons that
due to their vagueness cannot be held to have any
solemn and meaningful purpose.
You can abolish democracy by banning the vote or you
can do it by letting people vote as many times as
they want, by letting small children and foreigners
vote, until no one sees the point in counting the
votes or taking the process seriously. The same goes
for marriage or any other institution. You can
destroy it by outlawing it or by eliminating its
meaningfulness until it becomes so open that it is
absurd.
Every aspect of marriage is deconstructed and then
eliminated until it no longer means anything. And
once marriage is no longer a lifetime commitment
between a man and a woman, but a ceremony with no
deeper meaning than most modern ceremonies, then the
deconstruction and destruction will be complete.
The deconstruction of marriage eroded it as an
enduring institution and then as an exclusive
institution and finally as a meaningful institution.
The trendy folk who claim to be holding off on
getting married until gay marriage is enacted are
not eager for marriage equality, they are using it
as an excuse for an ongoing rejection of marriage.
Gay marriage was never the issue. It was always
marriage.
In the world that the deconstructionists are
striving to build, there will be marriage, but it
will mean nothing. Like a greeting card holiday, it
will be an event, but not an institution. An old
ritual with no further meaning. An egotistical
exercise in attention-seeking and self-celebration
with no deeper purpose. It will be a display every
bit as hollow as the churches and synagogues it
takes place in.
The deconstruction of marriage is only a subset
of the deconstruction of gender from a state of
being to a state of mind. The decline of marriage
was preceded by the deconstruction of gender roles
and gay marriage is being succeeded by the
destruction of gender as anything other than a
voluntary identity, a costume that one puts on and
takes off.
Destroying gender roles was a prerequisite to
destroying gender. Each deconstruction leads
naturally to the next deconstruction with no final
destination except total deconstruction.
Gay marriage is not a stopping point, just as men in
women's clothing using the ladies room is not a
stopping point. There is no stopping point at all.
The left's deconstruction of social institutions is
not a quest for equality, but for destruction. As
long as the institutions that preceded it exist, it
will go on deconstructing them until there is
nothing left but a blank canvas, an unthinking
anarchy, on which it can impose its perfect and
ideal conception of how everyone should live.
Equality is merely a pretext for deconstruction.
Change the parameters of a thing and it ceases to
function. Redefine it and expand it and it no longer
means anything at all. A rose by any other name
might smell as sweet, but if you change 'rose' to
mean anything that sticks out of the ground, then
the entire notion of what is being discussed has
gone and cannot be reclaimed without also reclaiming
language.
The left's social deconstruction program is a war of
ideas and concepts. Claims of equality are used to
expand institutions and ways of living until they
are so broad as to encompass everything and nothing.
And once a thing encompasses everything, once a rose
represents everything rising out of the ground, then
it also represents nothing at all.
Deconstruction is a war against definitions, borders
and parameters. It is a war against defining things
by criminalizing the limitation of definitions. With
inclusivity as the mandate, exclusivity, in
marriage, or any other realm, quickly meets with
social disapproval and then becomes a hate crime. If
the social good is achieved only through maximum
inclusivity and infinite tolerance, then any form of
exclusivity, from property to person to ideas, is a
selfish act that refuses the collective impulse to
make all things into a common property with no
lasting meaning or value.
As Orwell understood in 1984, tyranny is
essentially about definitions. It is hard to fight
for freedom if you lack the word. It is hard to
maintain a marriage if the idea no longer exists.
Orwell's Oceania made basic human ideas into
contradictory things. The left's deconstruction of
social values does the same thing to such essential
institutions as marriage; which becomes an important
impermanent thing of no fixed nature or value.
The left's greatest trick is making things mean the
opposite of what they do. Stealing is sharing. Crime
is justice. Property is theft. Each deconstruction
is accompanied by an inversion so that a thing, once
examined, comes to seem the opposite of what it is,
and once that is done, it no longer has the old
innate value, but a new enlightened one.
To deconstruct man, you deconstruct his beliefs and
then his way of living. You deconstruct freedom
until it means slavery. You deconstruct peace until
it means war. You deconstruct property until it
means theft. And you deconstruct marriage until it
means a physical relationship between any group of
people for any duration. And that is the opposite of
what marriage is.
The deconstruction of marriage is part of the
deconstruction of gender and family and those are
part of the long program of deconstructing man. Once
each basic value has been rendered null and void,
inverted and revealed to be random and meaningless,
then man is likewise revealed to be a random and
meaningless creature whose existence requires
shaping by those who know better.
The final deconstruction eliminates nation,
religion, family and even gender to reduce the soul
of man to a blank slate waiting to be written on.
That is what is at stake here. This is not a
struggle about the right of equality, but the right
of definition. It is not about whether men can get
married, but whether marriage will mean anything at
all. It is about preserving the shapes and
structures of basic social concepts that define our
identities in order to preserve those very concepts,
rather than accepting their deconstruction into
nullification.
The question on the table is whether the
institutions that give us meaning will be allowed to
retain that meaning. And that question is a matter
of survival. Societies cannot survive without
definitions. Peoples do not go on existing through
the act of occupying space. The deconstruction of
identity is also the destruction of people.
And that is what we are truly fighting against.