Courtney McGrailDefending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity
by Anthony Esolen
(Saint Benedict Press, US$ 14.95; www.SaintBenedictPress.com )
Sean Ryan
This book, by the Professor of English at Providence College, Rhode Island, is a topical read for Irish people facing into the same-sex marriage referendum. It is appropriate, too, that it is written by a Professor of English, for language – and its true meaning – is at the heart of this issue.
As befits his calling, Dr Esolen is a little bit too fond of quoting Shakespeare, but once the reader gets beyond that, his arguments make plenty of sense in a situation where commonsense appears to have been thrown overboard, not only by the various political parties, but also the media corps.
Esolen shows how the push for same-sex marriage is just a further step along the path of a sexual revolution. As he points out, not so long ago everybody agreed that marriage was between a man and a woman, and that its purpose was to produce the next generation.
Now, with individualism running rampant, the call is for an ‘anything goes’ regime in which children are often regarded as an unwanted by-product, or else produced as a commodity by a couple unable to conceive them naturally.
“If we pretend that a man can marry another man, or a woman can marry another woman,” Esolen writes, “we have consigned sex to irrelevance in a matter of plain biology. We have to pretend that sex does not matter for anything at all. We thus subject children, who are incapable of making our mental evasions, to the deprivation of a parent of their own sex or the opposite sex, and to a world in which they can be given no clear guidance as to what they are as boys and girls. We become authors of confusion.”
He makes the point that people “suppose that a Constitution is all you need to prevent the State from arrogating to itself a godlike power to direct and manage all things for all people,” but that the history of the last 100 years has put that daydream to rest.
Natural
“What really keeps the State in check,” he points out, “are other zones of authority, recognised as natural, with prescriptive rights and duties and areas of interest. It is not the State that defines what marriage is; nature has done that. It is not the State that determines the good of the family; nature has done that, too. It is not even the State that creates the village or the parish. Households have done that.”
Enlarging on this, he says: “The family is the single greatest bastion against the power of the State. That’s not because of ‘individual’ rights. It’s because the family claims precedence in being and in nature. It is itself a society anterior to the greater society.”
He then paints a frightening picture of a ‘jealous’ State. “What the State essentially does, when it requires us to be parties to the lie that a man can marry a man, is to deny the anterior reality of marriage itself. It says, ‘Marriage is what we say it shall be,’ and that implies, ‘Families are what we say they are,’ and that implies, ‘There are no zones of natural authority outside the supervision and regulation and management of the State’.”
Esolen develops his ideas, and concludes: “The lesson is simple. If you want true liberty – if you want actually to be able to walk down a back street at night without fear; if you want a real voice in what goes on in the school around the corner – then you want to bolster the family against the state. But you cannot do that if you grant to the State the godlike power to determine what a family or a marriage is in the first place.”
Esolen’s arguments make for sombre reading. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.