WASHINGTON. (BP)–Protections favoring marriage are built into the law and the culture because of the central importance of the family unit as the building block of civilization, according to Robert Knight of the Family Research Council based in Washington, D.C.
A document by Knight titled, “How Domestic Partnerships Threaten the Family,” is available on the Internet at www.frc.org.
In 1888, the U.S. Supreme Court described marriage “as creating the most important relation in life, as having more to do with the morals and civilization of a people than any other institution,” Knight quotes the court. The legal focus came as a result of national furor over Mormon polygamy, he writes.
But, Knight reports, a note in 1991 in the Harvard Law Review advocated replacing the formal definition of family with an elastic standard based, in the journal’s words, “mainly on the strength or duration of emotional bonds,” regardless of sexual orientation. The note recommends redefining the family through “domestic partner” or family “registration” statutes so as to achieve parity between marriage and other relationships, Knight writes.
“Gay marriage is an oxymoron, an ideological invention designed to appropriate the moral capital of marriage and family toward the goal of government-enforced acceptance of homosexuality,” Knight contends.
Once the “one man, one woman” limitation to marriage is broken, there’s no reason a marriage would need to be limited to two people, or even to people, Knight writes.
Analyzing studies of cultures spanning several thousand years on several continents, Knight noted that the late Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin found that virtually all political revolutions that brought about societal collapse were preceded by sexual revolutions in which marriage and family were no longer accorded premiere status.
Cultures have always found it necessary to encourage new marriages and protect existent marriages by extending rewards and privileges for this productive behavior and by extending sanctions and stigmas to unproductive behaviors, such as promiscuous sex and homosexual sex, Knight writes. Research and common sense show the health of any given society depends largely on the number of intact, mom-and-dad families, he writes, adding that people living in other arrangements benefit from the social order derived from the marital order.
Domestic partnerships and gay marriages are being advocated as an extension of tolerance and as a matter of civil rights, but these are really wedges designed to overturn traditional sexual morality, as is acknowledged by many homosexual activists themselves, Knight concludes, counseling voters and corporations to resist the demands made on them to equate family life with behavior that has been deemed unhealthy, immoral and destructive to individuals and societies in cultures the world over.
