DISCARDING MARRIAGE?
The feverish excitement over the debate about gay marriage has been washing to and fro across North America.
As I tried to make sense of the debate, I could not help but thinking about my own parent's disastrous marriage.
They met, got married, had a bunch of kids and then things went bad. The family exploded into fragments leaving nothing but some polaroid photos in the aftermath.
The breakup was wrenching, bitter and destructive.
After all that, I began wondering what on Earth marriage was for anyway?
I thought back to the days before the Earth was a full of humans…. just tiny communities wandering around searching for food and shelter.
In these microcosms of society, why did the early people find it necessary to begin formalizing marriage in the form we commonly see today?
There were many alternative ways to organize procreation. Here are a few that could have been chosen:
1) Have sex with whomever you are able to seduce (or be seduced by) as you wander through the grasslands. (as practied by baboons and hippies)
2) The strongest males round up a bunch of females and have their way with them.(as pactice by gorillas and Islamicists)
3) The strongest females round up a bunch of males and have their way with them( as practiced by hyenas).
4) Take turns in an orderly fashion. Each night or each week, partners are switched following a strict lunar-based calendar. (As practiced by people in Palm Beach)
5) Assign one male to one female permanently (as practiced by most people and geese)
These are all functional ways to organize procreation and in fact are practiced in some form or other around the world at present.
The real problem with the first four options is that if children are born from these efforts, several nasty imbalances begin to emerge over time.
In the first model, random copulation would result in children belonging only to the women. With no certified fathers, women would have to do the "It-takes-a-village-to-raise-a-child" thing because a person cannot raise a child by herself? . If she stayed in the hut looking after baby, there would be no food, and if the baby was left behind while the single parent went to find food, she would return to a dead baby.
The "It-takes-a-village-to-raise-a-child" model is a fiction practiced by disinterested parents who want to shirk responsibility for the daily work it takes to properly raise children. It does not work in the long term because when children are handed off to a third party to raise, the children grow up into adults unsure about their own role in the circle of life. Their own instincts to spawn and raise their own children are blunted and over time, fertility rates decline as parental behaviour fails to pass to the next generation.
Europe and much of caucazoidal North America are in a fertility decline. Some say that economic opportunity is the cause. I say that the lack of parental models is the real cause of declining fertility rates. Even if there were economic opportunities around me, if I were inclined to be a parent, how would the existence of a job opportunity cause me to lose sight of my inclinations?
In pre-historic days, lack of fertility resulted in the death of a society. With high mortality rates, many children had to be born to sustain the population and it must have been observed that the rise of a generation that was ambivalent about their role as parents resulted in rapid population decline and eventual failure of the society. It must have occured to the ancients that communally raised children were not inclined to raise enough children of their own and thus rejected the model.
If a person lived in a society that followed model number two from the list above, he or she would be compelled to teach the sons to be savage brutes so that they could fight off other males when it came time to acquire mates. The strong would have all the females and the weak would have none.
The same would be true of option three. People would be forced to teach their daughters to be savage calculating bitches if they wanted them to have a chance of procreating. They would have to claw off other ambitious women in order to attain the prize. Hyenas follow a model similar to this one and it is not pretty. Model two and model three are not compatible with civilized living.
The fourth option (taking turns in an orderly fashion) is actually being practiced at present with marriage and then re-marriage after divorce. This would be fine if there were no children I guess but there are serious problems when children are involved (as any child of divorced parents will tell you). Humans are not designed to be passed from one parent to another. When it happens, it is traumatic and often damaging. A variation of this model is the big happy blended family. Ex-spouses cheerfully raising a bunch of out-sourced children but it’s success is based on the static nature of the new family. If the second marriages were to break again, the children involved are put through another round of hell. The rotational marriages only succeed when the rotation actually stops and becomes like a regular husband/wife family.
Humans, in their accumulated wisdom, decided to follow the fifth option so as to avoid burdensome child-raising issues as well as instability during the all-important formative years of children. They called an end to orgies and swing parties and decided to formalize marriages with a simple pledge.
If you did not wish to have kids, you could do what ever you wanted but if you did indeed want to release your spawn into society, it was decided that it would be best if you and your mate stood up to say that you were committing to the heavy burden of children raising.
That is it.
There is not special status gained from marriage (except if you are John F. Kerry).
Marriage boils down to this singularity….” I will mate with one person and I will hang around to raise the resulting offspring.”....that's not a singularity, it's a dualarity.
Love, companionship and all that other crap are merely cushions to blunt the often brutally hard experiences that usually come with parenthood. Poverty, fear and vulnerability.
Now back to gay marriage.
Why would two men want to exercise a pledge that has nothing to do with anything except the spawning of children?
Do they merely want “what those people at that table are having?”
Are they curious about the experience people have when they decide to pledge to society that they will start mating and have some children to fill our world?
Are they searching for legitimacy in a society that invests heavily in the idea of marriage and thus to be on the outside leaves one feeling left out?
Are they searching for love out of the mistaken belief that having a certificate of marriage makes a couple more capable of love than they actually are without it?
Do they want to partake of the “benefits” that society grants married people? In many organizations, if a person dies, the surviving spouse continues to get pension payments until they too die off. This was instituted at a time when men worked and women stayed home and as such, the women had no pensions of their own and needed a continuation of the pension while she remained alive.
That is largely not the case now and is definitely not the case when there are two men in a relationship.
Maybe it is because they want to make sure that the society they are in does not treat them as rejects as has been done in the past.
Perhaps but none of these things are assured in marriage. Married people have been treated like second class citizens often in human history.
The truth of the matter is that marriage has nothing to do with societal legitimacy or happiness or economic security or love or any thing resembling any of those things.
Marriage is simply an ancient contract...life must go on no matter what. Through poverty, crime, disease, famine, predators, governments and war, life MUST go on. The "life" spoken of here is not the life as in "holding hands over morning coffee" or "walks by the beach" in a commercial for Ancient Grains cereal.
The life I am speaking of is the blood covered births complete with suction tubes in the lungs, jaundice, healing belly buttons and shrieking babies. It is life in the sense of still births and live births and birth defects and miscarriages and breach births and suckling and burping and feedings at 3:00am and 4:00 am and 5:00 am. The fatigue and the happiness and the bitterness and grief of loss. Marriage is all these things.
Not taking part in the drama of placentas and daipers is valid life option. Not everyone wants to be part of that drama but marriage was made exclusively for that.
Not for walks in the park or pillow talk. It was made for blood and pain.
It is nice to take the mantle of marriage and put it on for validation like a man putting on a bomber jacket to invoke the heroism of the WW2 pilots but the truth is marriage still only means what it has always meant....a pledge that life must go on.
Various marital models claim to offer some help in this regard. Look at the polygamous "marriages" that do indeed fill the world with children. Fair enough but there is really only one model that keeps the ccontract of life itself with all it's craziness alive continuosly over eons of time.
Marriage has survived massive societal catastrophes throughout history.
In Europe, the Great Plague destroyed about a third of the total population. Marriage endured this and went on to re-populate the continent with new generations.
Slavery ripped millions of people away form their homes and ultures but marriage re-emerged and helped to re-formulate the brutalized and detached societies and brought life and hope where there was nothing but pain and death.
Communism swept across the old societies of China, Korea, Eastern Europe and Russia.
This dumbest of philosophies tried as hard as it could to break apart the societies it conquered to make them malleable. To do this, it's agents set on destroying marriage by turning families against each other, spouse against spouse and child and against parent and yet marriage endured all that crap and outlive the Soviet block and will certainly outlive Communist China and all the vileness that that system imposes on marriage including forced abortions. A quick look at CHICOM's handling of marriage leaves one nauseated.
Of all institutions, marriage has done the most. It has done more than capitalism, communism, internationalism, celebrity aid concerts and all the religions put together. It has cradled billions of children. It has reliably fed, taught, protected and raised countless children over thousands of years.
It has replicated itself like DNA over all that time..... each generation seeing the simple model and repeating it over and over again because it was not contrary to human nature but rather parallel with human instincts no matter which part of the globe they lived.
This is not to say that children cannot be brought up in other marital models but rather to say that other marital models are flimsy. They require propping up and oversight and understanding and tolerance and legal statutes and Supreme Court rulings and political stability for protection.
The marriage of a man and a woman requires no such thing. It does not need city hall or lawyers or Supreme Courts or even tolerance. For some insane reason, people decided to hand the administration of their marriages over to governmental authority which is like banking with the neighbourhood lemonade stand. People agreed to hand over an institution of stupendous gravity over to the state which is a shifting and temporary institution at best and efficient killing machine at worst.
The state, like any other mindless beast, should never have been trusted with marriage because the state's behaviour is governed by expedience rather than concern for life itself.
North Americans have worked extremely hard to discredit marriage over the last 40 years and have succeeded in many important ways.
The sexual revolution in the sixties (heralded by the hippies and children of the flowers) sought to reorganize society based on the first model…random sex.
This model has had ghastly effects including the need to legalize abortion so that the “unexpected” children arriving after the copious mating could be sanitarily disposed of and forgotten.
The explosion of sexual diseases was another delightful effect of their dream and the once relatively pristine sexual world was turned into a cesspool of genitally carried plagues.
Sex, the carrier of life, became a leading cause of sterility and death in many parts of the world.
The attempt to destroy traditional marriage failed. Free sex was found not to be free at all. The old lessons that were learned by our ancient ancestors had to be re-learned yet again.
Will marriage survive redefinition by a two-bit Canadian court to mean the union of any combination of adult persons. Of course.
It survived Stalin and "Club 54". How can it fail to survive an administrative redefinition?
Societies rise and fall. Their handling of the important matters such as procreation determine how long and how successful they are.
Mishandling marriage is detrimental but not to marriage itself. Any society that claims to have the power to override marriage and claim for itself the power to discard it will be washed up like a bunch of stoned hippies in an alley.
After my own parent's vicious divorce, I was shaken but the simple model survived in my mind and continues with me. My parents discarded their marriage and price they are paying for that is astronomical.
I watched what happened to them as a result of their reckless treatment of their marriage and became convinced that it is not to be handled like a thing of amusement or a political tool. The misuse of marriage always results in disaster as my parents discovered and as societies in days gone by have learned.
Marriage of one man and one woman will supercede everything. It always has.
