Stumble it!Help! Help! Save the children!
posted in Society by themaiden |When I see article like this one at United Families International I can’t help but think, “How divorced from reality do you have to be… how ignorant of history do you have to be… how blind to the basic facts of human civilization… how foolishly ethnocentric do you have to be be to actually believe that the Family– with a capital ‘F’– is in danger or that the ‘The Children’ are threatened?” The ‘Family’ has popped up in every civilization we know about. ‘The Family’ just seem to be ever present. Look around. Every culture has got one. No exceptions. The ‘Family’ really just flows directly from human reproductive biology, which leads me to suggest another question, “How ignorant of human biology do you have to be to think that the ‘Family’ is in danger and ‘The Children’ are threatened?”
Of course, not all families look the same cross culturally, and that is the catch isn’t it? People arguing for ‘The Family’ aren’t really arguing for the family, they are arguing for a very particular recent western incarnation of the family, which in some never specified nor justified way is superior to all the other options we humans have toyed with throughout our history. The mere fact, though, that such options have existed, do exist, and work just fine– and in some cases have worked just fine for hundreds or thousands of years– makes arguing for the superiority of this one recent incarnation somewhat asinine. It makes no sense to argue that ‘The Family’ must be preserved or else we are doomed as a people when ‘The Family’ refered to has only really existed for at best a couple of hundred years. Dig back further and you start to see some significant differences. But ignoring that, jump around the planet a bit and you’ll find some notions of family radically different from the one necessary-or-we-are-doomed notion we must so desperately defend. Which means we ought not worry too much about defending one particular definition of family. It isn’t sacred. Other options work just fine.
An aside: if you defend ‘The Family’ because it is sacred, then you have no business shoving the issue into the political process. ‘Sacred’ is a religious concept, what is or is not sacred varies with religion, and thus legislating a ‘proper’ family is legislating religion. I think this is why so many people who defend the family try so desperately to argue that some horrid cultural catastrophe will occur if ‘The Family’ dissolves. Such arguments mask the religious motivations.
But what about the kids? Ah, yes… the kids.
Well… we’re still here. We’ve survived for most of our million plus years in the absense of this ‘Family’ that we cannot do without. Kids have been born. Kids have grown up. Kids have had kids of their own. And so on. And so on. All of this in the absense of the nuclear family which– did I mention?– we must preserve or else we are doomed.
Granted, this current debate is about gay marriage, which is rare but not unheard of in human history, but humans have done things far more odd. Take Sparta’s state run child rearing policies for example. And we’ve survived. Really, all that history proves is that for the species to survive kids need to be born and they need to be cared for by someone or some group. It doesn’t matter much by who.
Finally, how nuts do you have to be, E. Douglas Clark, to compare the gay marriage debate to the defense of Warsaw against Hitler’s war machine?
Walking into the place is like stepping back in time to 1944 when the citizens of the city rejected surrender and rose up to defend themselves and their families against the Nazi occupiers. The Polish heroes of the uprising are memorialized in the sobering display of photos, footage, letters and historical summaries and war memorabilia, all exhibited in a fashion that movingly recreates the terrible ordeal. As the Polish resistance incurred the increasing fury of Hitler’s army, a cry rang out throughout the city, as seen on a small plaque in the museum: “Save the children—ours, yours… Collapsed buildings we can rebuild—the lost young generation we cannot.”
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To such questions, our response is the same rallying cry that once resounded throughout embattled Warsaw: “Save the children!”
Some related posts:
Gay Marriage and the Collapse of Western Civilization
A secular argument against same sex marriage?
Gay marriage is the end of marriage.
Marriage = 1 man + 1 woman
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