In Defense of Civilisation, or Pro-Proposition 8

AMERICA, FAMOUSLY DEPRIVED BY ITS OWN HAND of an aristocracy of land and church, has one in the present day comprised of the pompous and the charlatan. They think just like Gladstone on the matter of man-marriage; Tom Hanks, or Lord Hanks of Sanctimony and Fathead-on-Thickneck, has said emphatically that those who voted in favour of Proposition 8, which overturned a narrow judicial imposition of gay marriage on the state of California, were un-American. But slaying that (in)judicial perversion in a hail of ballots is merely an excellent example of the stolid, plain-sighted, clear-minded yeoman stock of the average Yank (be he white, black, yellow, red or brown), or cut from however-so-much bits of cloth in this globalised age, (for the votes came equally from all minorities and majorities), rebuking the festering fools they are lamentably now stuck with for their lordly lords. We should defend them! In this instance they are absolutely correct. Gladstone’s heartfelt defense of homosexual marriage is a curious little flag to run up the Monarchist’s mast of a Monday morning. But it is the blankest white of surrender, and flaps only with the wind of the spirit of the age. It is terrible. Where shall it blow next? Who can tell?

Of course, this post riding into the lists against him might seem a silly contest over a small point, but in being so small, it is perilously great. The true test of a conservative (or traditionalist, or monarchist, or gentleman), like Luther’s true test of a Christian, is not whether they will boldly stand for 99% of the Truth, but whether they will stand in the breach for that 1% presently being assailed. Their fidelity to nearly all of it is as nothing to their infidelity on the point being troubled. They are fair-weather friends; and in a sky filling with clouds, such men have a duty to correct themselves, or be corrected. Gladstone, sadly, has failed that test. And I do not blame him. It is a terrible prospect to stand before the world and be so uncivil and preposterous as to question the current orthodoxy on homosexuality. Marinated by sympathetic Hollywood storylines and characters, encouraged by leftist political hand-wringing and all-pervasive, swift-moving political correctness, and now coerced by what currently passes for ‘good form’ in the wife-swapping middle classes, where shall a traditionalist dare profess that he holds to the unbroken wisdom of the millennia, against the temporary experiments of the decade, on this matter? Only in a very, very small and safe room, from behind a very carefully constructed shield wall.

Here are some thoughts, anyway. (Read on)


1. Gay marriage is not just about gay marriage. This will sound harshest for those who think homosexual marriage is simply the means by which people can be made happy in their lives. But for better or worse, long before the idea of gay marriage ever turned up, there was no - and there remains no - prohibition on gay couples cohabiting permanently until death parts them. They are free to do so. In recent times they have always been free to do so. So that is not, in fact, what they are seeking. If they were, they wouldn’t be asking for gay marriage. They wouldn’t be asking for anything. In fact they are seeking society’s approval, religion’s benediction and authority’s enforcement; and for a verdict which agrees that there is no difference between monogamous sodomy and reproductive marriage, and that there has never been, and never shall be any such distinction. This cannot be allowed.

It would be the final nail in a coffin diligently put together by the liberal left these past fifty years, by which they seek once and for all to bury traditional marriage. And it would have society, religion and authority’s feckless hands driving it in. They wish to entomb that old relic at a time when social breakdown, moral decay, rampant youth crime and murder, mass illiteracy, paralysed birth-rates, cultural anarchy, and widespread hopelessness and depression tells us the that the world, having given it up, can scarcely live without it.

For the argument in favour of homosexual marriage has only been allowed to form even the most dim notion in the heads of those who now scream it from the rooftops, because heterosexual marriage has itself been transformed into something alien and odd since the Flesh Revolution of the 1960s. It is the only way that it has become even slightly plausible. You can only trick yourself into seeing some resemblance, you see, between the two, if you have transformed traditional heterosexual marriage likewise into a compact involving two bread-winners, lots of unproductive sex, interchangeability of gender roles, symmetry of duty and authority, separation from child-bearing, obsession with immediate satisfaction, and nothing else. And in so far as ordinary marriage has become like this, we already have gay marriage: it is what modern society has made of natural marriage. But natural men and women must reject this, all of this, and any further solidifying of the changes, which gay marriage would utterly confirm. It leads not to happiness, but to wrack and ruin, and innumerable broken marriages, and countless lost souls, and frenetic pathetic lusting, and the constant bloody Massacre of the Innocents, every day, in hospitals up and down our world, for the great cause of convenience.

I am not saying gay marriage causes this. I am saying gay marriage is the affirmation of this, and the confirmation of this decided change in the general notion of marriage - and the further postponement, and prevention, of it being mended. It crowns the false god. And we shall have a deal of time dethroning it if we keep going down this path.

2. The simple but obstinate matter of facts. I dislike it when people knowingly lay down reality for the comfort of wishful thinking (which, before any wise alecs say something stupid, differs from the Christian religion in so far as that religion is the comfort in reality by facing its harshest fact of death). Are people blind? Do they really need someone to stand forth and point out the blaring obvious fact that a contract of monogamous sodomy is not, has never been, and can never be the same as the Christian contract of holy matrimony? What have men or women with such desires got remotely in common with the complimentary, clearly purposeful (whether evolution or God is your, er, God), genuine and productive union of man and wife, in a long-term stable relationship ideal for the rearing of children, communication of virtue and prosperity, and the obviation of lust and loneliness in real complimentarity (rather than coincidence of desire)? What has one kind of relationship, prohibited by the ages and our ancestors, got to do with the other, lauded by the ages and our ancestors?

Christian (or heterosexual, or traditional) marriage, as Peter Marshall put it, is a coming together of two tributaries, which after they are joined together flow forever in a stronger course. They are not a treaty, nor even a federation, but a Union. And how shall we test if this is true? As with anything, by its fruits: and its fruits are children, and by them the binding together of society in generations, and by this the furtherance of civilisation in kindness, care, development, and slowly accrued, carefully handed on wisdom. It is the heart of the real great principle of true Progress: inheritance! It clearly works. I shall not name some of the more infamous fruits of homosexual relationships. I wish to be polite. But you see it cannot be the same thing. In terms of a family tree, it is deforestation. It is altogether a different beast. It is a complete and infantile category error to be even talking of gays 'marrying'.

And to say, in opposing such arguments, as many have, that the existence of childless traditional marriages must allow childless monogamous sodomy, is like saying that broken chairs license the production of chairs which were never designed to work. Likewise, bridging the childless gap with tubes and dishes and all manner of science scarcely less violent than that of Dr Frankenstein’s merely proves this (rather than, as some nonsensically say, erasing it).

3. The mixed-race argument is one too often trotted out without much thought or reason behind it. Gladstone is right in identifying this old perversion as wicked; but I should point out that it was, like gay marriage, precisely that: a perversion, or ineffectual and day-dreaming amendment of nature. And really the issue here would be if Gladstone was correct in saying that the quite correct alteration away from this brief error, post-Civil Rights, renders impossible all opposition to any other redefinition of marriage in the future (like gay marriage). Thank God he is wrong. The implications of being right almost don’t bear thinking about. Upon this basis nothing could withstand nuptials between dogs and Dutchmen, your fob watch and your left brogue, or your aunt and her Audi. (Or think of some more plausible horror, which I shall not dirty this website with, but which your average daily newspaper can undoubtedly furnish you with many suggestions for).

The issue here connects to a broader one: that of anchors. If we are not to make biology, or tradition, or religion our rule (because homosexuality and homosexual marriage radically defies all of those), we have thrown out every rational and successful measure and restriction of behaviour available to us. You can knock down such things, but whither shall you run for defence when society’s decay advances in another fashion? You are making what is polite and fashionable your final rule. This might seem at first quite proper, and superficially gentlemanly; but the truest gentleman bears no resemblance to the simpering, craven, substanceless man of such philosophy, who has always been known by the appellation - Cad.

4. And lastly, though it is a small thing in his original post, the matter of Mr Gladstone’s first rejecting altogether the Word of God, and then snatching a portion of it triumphantly to his chest in a victory pose. Such trifling use of any document would strike any disinterested observer as absurd; doing so with sacred things borders on the abominable. It is enough to remind him that nothing in scripture is inconsistent, as long as you are guided in your interpretation of any given text by all the rest of the scriptures, in whatever ways they may touch it. Clearly, a Bible which also warns against homosexuality, cannot possibly be later including it as a positive example of God’s love. Gladstone may indeed feel that he worships a God who he is allowed to stand roughly in the same sort of equation to as a gay man stands to his husband (if such love is, he says, godly); but he shall not go around buggering up Holy Scripture as long as I’m around here.

Please direct all hate mail to your lavatory and/or compost heap, c/o a flamethrower.