7. The legalization of homosexual pseudogamy seals us in a culture of divorce. In the United States, it is estimated that nearly half of all marriages will end in divorce. It is hard to see how any community can survive the resulting break-up of homes, the smashing of friendships, the jumble and shuffle of neighborhoods, and the underlying assumption that human beings are not to be trusted.
Social science has finally come round to showing just a bit of what we all ought to have known anyway: Divorce is deeply damaging to the family and to the community. Boys who grow up apart from their fathers are many times more likely to fall prey to drugs and crime; girls are more likely to seek male affirmation elsewhere and bear children out of wedlock. Spend a little time getting to know the destroyed lives of a few of the millions of young men in prison, and then try to defend divorce—or the habit in some communities of never forming a marriage in the first place.
http://jhandersen.photoshelter.com/
Prior to the age of no-fault divorce, we were told by the social reformers that the current divorce laws were outdated and cruel, often compelling people to manufacture ugly accusations against one another just to procure the divorce. We were told that the reform of the laws would not increase the incidence of divorce—since those who wanted to divorce would do so eventually in any case. But it would save a great deal of human misery.
Yet that is exactly what the no-fault divorce laws have failed to do. Divorce swept the land like a plague, and brought misery in its wake. And the no-fault system is patently unjust: It often subjects the wronged party to the whim of the guilty one; it rules out the most commonsense considerations of child custody; and it reduces marriage to a status below that of a business contract.
If one business partner in a gas station embezzled funds and used them to buy stock in the competition, would that partner, upon dissolution of the contract, get to claim half of the original station? If the embezzling partner were a woman, would she get to compel her former business partner to provide her financial support as she bought even more of the competitor’s stock? Would not such malfeasance land people like this in jail? Why do we take the ownership of corporations more seriously than the establishment of families?
Any statesman must see that we cannot continue this way. At the basis of all civilization lies trust: I must be able to believe that the people driving down the road will stay on their own side of the yellow line. Divorce begins by undermining trust in marriage (and that is bad enough, given our plummeting birthrates) and ends by undermining trust altogether. We must retrace our steps; we must bring some semblance of justice back to divorce law.
But how can we do so while legalizing homosexual pseudogamy? Again, the principle for the legalization is that people have a right to “fulfill” themselves sexually. But some marriages are unhappy—or some people who are married come to think that it would be more “fulfilling” to leap the fence. How can we deny them this? Or how can we blame them? How can we penalize the breaker of a family, when his or her motives are those we have blessed in the case of the homosexual?
And what about homosexual adultery? We have been informed by homosexual activists themselves that people’s expectations in this regard will have to change. Homosexual men do not consistently remain “faithful” to their “spouses,” in the sense that they do not so severely restrict their sexual activity. But if a certain looseness is granted to the male homosexual, when his jealous lover chooses to “divorce” him, why should the same benefit not be accorded the male heterosexual?
Homosexual pseudogamy thus threatens the already embattled institution of marriage with a new barrage of divorces, custody litigation, and all their attendant misery.
The bases for marriage and homosexual union are, moreover, incompatible. The former is based upon the very structure of our bodies, upon biological and anthropological fact. The latter is based, as is the sexual revolution, upon the will alone. In practice, it must accelerate the destruction of marriage; its principle, or rather the false principle that made pseudogamy conceivable in the first place, is all the poison that is needed.
